Dr. Nicole Bedera

for a lot of reasons.

One of the things that I learned in my bones through this project, and I said to the students who worked on this project a lot, was that we all think rape is wrong until we know the perpetrator.

And I was pretty stunned by how quickly, essentially everyone within the institution would take the perpetrator's side when it was somebody who they knew.

Even if they also knew the victim, even if they were closer to the victim, there was this presumption that the perpetrator deserved more than the victim got.

There are a lot of other people who have written about this phenomenon.

One of the ones that again comes to mind to me is someone I mentioned before, Kate Mann, talking about empathy, because that's really what was happening.

You would hope that there would be some faculty who have a strong enough commitment to feminism, to gender egalitarianism, to nonviolence, that when it was right in front of them, they would immediately do what they could to support the survivor, to make sure they could finish their education, to make sure they were safe.

And instead, really everyone...

was responding by saying, we need to take a minute.

Let's hear the other side of the story.

I don't want to hurt that other person.

We've really internalized as a society, this idea that holding someone accountable for sexual assault is hurting them, which I think we've believed that for a long time.

Before Trump took office and changed the way we thought about Title IX so fundamentally, most people on campus would at least think that was immoral, even if they would participate in it.

And one of the things I saw in the field and that I've seen continue since then is this sort of full-throated acceptance of the idea that a perpetrator can be hurt through a survivor coming forward.

I was the most disheartened by certain people who I hoped would do better, and then they didn't.

There were a few people on campus who didn't contribute to the pain, but they lacked the power to stop it as well.

I'm thinking about people like victim advocates, or there were some feminist faculty who would do really simple things.

Like if there was a survivor in their classes and they were struggling under the trauma of all this and it was affecting their academics, they would work with them to find a way that they could still make the most out of their education, that they could learn something and that it wouldn't negatively impact their grades.

It is possible and there are people who are doing it.

And so that's something I want to be really clear about.