Dr. Nicole Bedera

And it didn't matter who the survivor was or what they did.

The language they would use is all very gendered.

Part of the sacrifice of being a woman is letting it go when you're sexually assaulted to protect the future, the privileges, all of the social power for your perpetrator.

That, I would say, was the main misunderstanding about survivors that I would run into, was this real sense around their use of empathy, that women were less important than men, and that because a woman had experienced violence, she now had less to contribute.

Her life was already ruined, she was already broken, and there was no undoing that harm.

Whereas the perpetrator was still fully intact, and so they would use language like...

One life is already ruined.

Why ruin two?

To justify their unwillingness to step in.

That, I would say, is the biggest misunderstanding I saw about sexual violence.

What we know is that healing from sexual assault is not only possible, but very likely.

Sexual violence is so common in our society that if it broke all of us, there wouldn't be women around to do so many things in our society.

A lot of the trauma that we ascribe to the sexual assault comes from institutional betrayal.

So if a survivor gets the support they need right away, if they can get access back to their autonomy, if they can feel respected and cared for and protected by their community, they can recover very quickly.

A lot of that enduring trauma that continues comes from institutional betrayal.

It comes from going to ask for help and being told no.

That meant that the administrators, when they were looking at the victims and saying it's too late to help them, but we can still help the perpetrator, what they were really failing to recognize was that they were the source of harm at this point.

that the harm from the perpetrator was only one piece of what was making things difficult for the survivor.

And I could see that so clearly.

Some of the survivors from the study stayed in touch after the study was over.