Dr. Nicole Bedera

Those cases were absolutely happening at Western University, and I heard about them on the periphery.

But the staff was so good at making it difficult to report that I think a lot of those survivors did not enter the Title IX system.

I had Western University's help in recruiting for the study.

I recruited through the Victim Advocacy Office, the Dean of Students Office, and the Title IX Office.

And what they were supposed to do was for any case involving a student, whether they were a victim, perpetrator, or students were in both roles, they were supposed to give them the recruitment form to participate in the study.

But what I quickly realized was they were not recruiting for cases involving faculty.

It's one of the big missing holes in the book because the research that we have would suggest that the most common type of sexual harassment on a college campus, and as researchers, we use sexual harassment in the legal way.

So that includes what the average person thinks of sexual harassment, but also all types of sexual violence, stalking, intimate partner violence, all of this other stuff too.

So it's a glaring omission from the book.

What I could get access to instead were cases involving students where faculty inserted themselves because they wanted to protect a certain student for whatever reason.

So, for example, one of the cases of the book, the perpetrator, he was a serial perpetrator.

There were multiple Title IX cases against him.

He was the star student in this theatrical type program.

You see a lot of sexual violence in theater programs because of some of those components we were talking about earlier.

They are not necessarily male dominated, but men tend to be in positions of power and they're very hierarchical and competitive.

For a theater department, the number of men they enrolled into their program was

can determine things like what shows they're going to be able to put on.

Because the way that the professors in the department would describe it was that women were a dime a dozen, but men were diamonds in the rough.

There was a case I heard about where when the star male student in this department was facing multiple Title IX cases, one professor in particular, who was also known to sexually harass students, started submitting statements on support of the perpetrator, even though they had no knowledge of the violence at all.

Obviously, that's such a deep institutional betrayal to the survivors.