Dr. Nicole Bedera

So bringing everybody up to an equitable amount of resources was a really significant shift.

And then the independence was also really huge because if they're employed by the university and they're watching the university violate a victim's rights, they weren't allowed to do things like encourage litigation against the university.

But in the California bill, that was one of the things that the representative who introduced it said very specifically was something that this bill should do.

If rights are being violated, an independent victim advocacy office can help a survivor sue their school.

to get connected to a pro bono lawyer, to file a complaint with the Department of Education.

Obviously, a lot of this would work a lot better if we had a federal government that was invested in protecting our civil rights.

But even in the absence of that, there's still a lot of other stuff that we can do on a more local level.

If we have those independent agents.

The other thing that I always like to add at the end of this question is just that a lot of these solutions are not complicated and that when it feels overwhelming to make the system from scratch, I want to be as clear as I possibly can to say that it would probably be simpler than people think.

There's a scholar, her name is Jackie Cruz, and she terms the Title IX process as orchestrating complexity, where they would create complexity where there is none to justify their inaction.

And I just find that frame really comforting when we think about imagining something better.

So many of these cases that I got to review during my year at Western University were not at all complicated.

That any average person would be able to know what happened, understand the stakes, and have some pretty good guesses at the types of things they could do to help a survivor.

All of the complexity had been added in by a system that wanted to do nothing and make everyone feel morally justified while they did nothing.

And so the idea of starting from scratch at independent agencies who wouldn't have these conflicts of interest, who wouldn't have histories of discrimination like our universities do, it makes me feel incredibly hopeful.

I think it would be a lot easier of a task than anyone listening probably thinks right now.

One of the things that gives me hope is that people who haven't thought much about this issue tend to be outraged by it.

And I know that's sort of a weird thing to say, and it's different than what I would have said a year ago when I was doing interviews when the book came out.

But what it's taught me is that there is the sense of justice and injustice within us that we apply to so many other things that we can leverage to get our responses to sexual violence closer to where they need to be.

One of the things that was really vexing in my work for On the Wrong Side is that you had all these people who on paper should be experts.