Dr. Nicole Bedera

They've told us that they hired all these staff and we do these prevention trainings and all these things have happened.

And then ultimately, it's toothless.

And once you get inside of it, you realize the system isn't even functional.

It can be a little easier to see in a historical example to start, but it's the rape whistle.

The universities, if you go back a few decades, they were handing out rape whistles at orientation, telling students, we would want to know if someone's trying to attack you.

That's sort of the idea of a whistle is that it alerts people around you to what's going on with the assumption they would intervene.

But rape whistles aren't a particularly useful intervention.

They assume that the perpetrator is a stranger, that violence only happens when you're walking around at night carrying your keys or your whistle, that it would never happen somewhere like your bedroom while you were asleep.

So there's a big misunderstanding of what violence is in that space.

Even this idea that if you blew the whistle that university administrators and professors and all these other people on campus would be running to help you isn't really what they're trained to do.

There's a reason why universities stopped giving them out.

And the same thing is happening on college campuses today.

When you're in your first moment of student orientation...

One of the first things that will happen at most schools now is that they will train you about consent.

They will tell you about sexual assault.

They will tell you that they want you to report sexual violence if it happens to you or someone you know.

But we're still running into the same issue with the rape whistle, which is that when you show up to report, there is no one at the school who has been trained in how to really help you.

If anything, they might have been trained about how to silence you and get you to stop trying to come forward.

And that's why it's such a jarring sense of betrayal because there haven't all these symbols trying to convince us that it's safe.

And it's just, it's not safe.