Dr. Nicole Bedera

That's maybe the one thing I would want to try to preserve and strengthen on campus is the confidential victim advocacy programs that some universities have put in place.

But the rest of it, our work is almost easier when we can just say we can throw it all out.

Let's completely start over.

And if we were completely starting over, the thing that I would recommend is an independent system.

Because ultimately, a lot of the problems with the Title IX process is that they are laden with conflicts of interest.

When a university is designing a system that will protect their favorite star professor or the football coach or whoever it is who they had in mind when they wrote these policies, you're going to get a system that looks the way Title IX functions.

Whereas if we had an independent entity that was designing their own system, it would probably look really different, a lot more survivor-centered.

Everyone with expertise on the Title IX process works for the university.

But if you have an independent office who by law has to be made aware of any change made to the Title IX process, you now have an independent outsider who can help a survivor based off of what the survivor wants versus the way the institution hopes this case will go.

That I would say is the most fundamental change that we need.

I don't want to understate the harms of the criminal justice system, but something that was shocking to me and that I think everybody needs to know is that the Title IX system produces more institutional betrayal and fewer accountability actions than our criminal justice system, which isn't a testament to how good the criminal justice system is.

It's a testament to how bad Title IX is.

And so when I say that any independent body could probably do better than our universities, I really do mean that almost any independent body could do better, assuming they are not aligned with

We actually seen some states starting to do a version of this to try it out on a smaller scale to protect those victim advocacy programs that I was talking about.

The state of California passed a bill unanimously a couple of years ago.

I spoke on behalf of this bill that made campus victim advocates employees of the state as opposed to employees of individual schools.

Obviously, that's much dicier in conservative states where the political sentiments are more hostile to survivors.

But in a state like California, what that allowed was for the state to be able to be the ones to hire and fire victim advocates.

They were able to do things like set a standard of how many victim advocates a university should have per student and the types of resources that should be allocated to those spaces.

That changed things pretty dramatically from the very beginning of that policy, because there were some universities that had pretty robust victim advocacy programs, but there were a lot that had one victim advocate serving all of their students.