Dr. Nicole Bedera

All of the Title IX staff had received specialized training around sexual violence, but what they'd been trained to do was protect perpetrators.

And that's a big problem, but it gives me some hope that it takes training.

It gives me some hope that it is a systematic effort that is required to get people to betray survivors on this way.

When people who are sort of fresh to thinking about sexual violence, and it's not something that's interfered with their life that much, when those people have read my book, they are outraged.

And it makes me feel like if we can just get ahead of it, we could change things really quickly.

When I was finishing the fieldwork for On the Wrong Side, I was obviously exhausted.

There was certainly some vicarious trauma as the result of this project.

More from the institutional betrayals than from hearing about the violence itself.

I always think that's important to clarify.

And people would say to me, are you just so depressed all the time?

Do you think that sexual violence is now just a part of human nature?

And you think it's just an impossible problem to solve?

And I said, no.

I am feeling the heaviness of the project, but the thing that's heavy is that I can tell it doesn't have to be this way.

And that the solutions to end sexual violence in our institutions are at our fingertips.

We know what they are.

It's not unsolvable.

The issue we're running into is that the people in positions of power are very often perpetrators or enablers of perpetrators themselves, and they're standing in our way.

But the rest of us

We're incredibly clear-minded on what we need to do.