Dr. Nicole Bedera

It was a very widely shared piece.

That was one of my first forays into the type of harassment and hostility towards anybody who speaks about this too publicly and speaks about sexual violence too publicly.

I got a series of emails from a sociology professor, of all people,

who really wanted me to use my platform to defend perpetrators.

Writing in the New York Times, it was sort of the first time I started hearing from perpetrators via email regularly, which has been a feature of my work ever since.

I'm sure there were a lot of supportive emails too, but what I remember is the perpetrator emails, the harassment, and all of it feeling a bit eerie in retrospect, seeing about how many Title IX rights we have lost since 2018.

Yeah, it absolutely did.

I started my work as a victim advocate at the same time that I got my first research grant to study campus sexual violence.

At the time, I was thinking, OK, I know this is an issue I want to do something about, but I don't know on which end.

Am I going to be a practitioner or am I going to be a researcher?

And I actually preferred being a victim advocate.

I liked that job a lot more than I enjoy research, which I think is part of why I'm now consulting as opposed to working as a professor.

But I ended up deciding to go to graduate school and become a researcher because it became so obvious to me that the system is so fundamentally oppressive, which is different than broken.

I think that the system is operating exactly as designed, and it's meant to oppress victims of violence, to strip them of their social status, and to re-traumatize them if they dare to say that the violence they experienced is wrong.

I was working as a hospital advocate, so I was seeing survivors sometimes mere hours after their sexual assaults.

And I was really struck by the way the system from its very onset was difficult, painful, re-traumatizing, sometimes hostile.

Survivors would internalize that almost immediately.

The questions I would get from survivors in that role were things like, why did this happen to me?

Why is it my fault?

why is everybody treating me this way now?