Dr. Nicole Bedera

And do we have enough evidence to do something about this one individual piece?

Yes or no.

And so they would fragment the violence into these little, tiny, easily dismissible pieces, which led to these huge benefits for some of the most prolific perpetrators on a college campus.

Well, the first thing I want to say is that it's gendered and that one of the things I found in my research and the others find as well is that when the role of what they would call complainant and respondent or accused and accuser are reversed,

and the person making the accusation is a man and the person being accused is a woman, the school tends to then side with the accuser.

They tend to side with the man, no matter what part of the process he's in.

And so I think that's a really important thing to recognize that the problem there isn't that they don't know what to do.

The problem there is that they're protecting patriarchy.

I think it's worth adding a little caveat on that.

In the cases that involve a complainant who is a man and a respondent who is a woman,

Most of the time what we're looking at is something called a retaliatory cross-complaint, which is when a perpetrator abuses the Title IX office to try to control their victim.

And the most common way that that happens is the victim files a complaint and the perpetrator files this retaliatory cross-complaint.

to make it look like, oh, haven't we both done bad things?

Or I'll drop my complaint if you drop yours.

And to try to confuse investigators into thinking that they don't know who the true victim is.

And in those cases, the school tends to still side with the man, even though they're in the complainant role.

One of the things I expected to find, and I've been told by so many people,

administrators, other researchers.

I've been told to expect that universities wanted to help survivors, but their hands were tied because perpetrators had so many more legal rights.

And it just is not true.