Dr. Nicole Bedera

How can we make sure that women are treated evenly and fairly?

How can we make sure that people who are gender marginalized, transgender and non-binary people are treated well too and are treated in a way where they have equal access to power?

Those are the types of things we have to be thinking about.

The other framework that comes to mind in terms of places that are safer or unsafe is just whether or not they're engaging in institutional betrayal, which is the scholarly concept that finds that when institutions behave in certain ways and they take certain actions or inactions, they refuse to help.

It can exacerbate a survivor's traumatic symptoms.

And there's a list of all of these different things that cause institutional betrayal.

Things like creating an environment where sexual violence feels normal and predictable.

Creating an environment where it's difficult to report or where people who are reported are punished.

Or creating an environment where if you experience violence, it's difficult for you to remain in that space and you don't feel valued by the institution.

So that's another list of things I'm thinking at the institutional level.

I don't think any amount of preparing in advance to think is this a safe or unsafe place guarantees that it'll be a safe space.

But it is the kind of thing that can let you know that things are starting to go awry.

I really can't emphasize the degree of ignorance that I heard from school administrators when I interviewed them about the reporting process and about survivors and what they expected.

It was one of the first places I'd been in a long time where I interviewed people who said things like, I thought all rape would be a stranger jumping out of the bushes.

I was surprised by how much came from people who knew each other.

The other thing I found is that that sort of naivete around violence is one of the things that the schools selected for in hiring, that they preferred people who believed in rape myths, who had misunderstandings about what violence is and how it operates.

They much preferred those candidates over people who were experts on sexual violence or had a lot of experience or empathy working with survivors.

The other thing that I found was just something that, this is not my concept, it comes from a philosopher named Kate Mann, is this concept of empathy, that they had this excessive empathy for perpetrators that came at the expense of survivors.

the things that when administrators were evaluating cases that they would look to, it wasn't that they didn't believe the survivors or that they thought the violence wasn't real.

The main thing that administrators were reacting to was a distaste for holding perpetrators accountable.