Not Only Do Campus Sexual Assailants Go Unpunished, They Often Get Special Treatment

Nicole Bedera met and interviewed “Justin” and “Marissa” a year after their Title IX case closed at the university they attended. Both were participants in Greek life, and even though Marissa reported Justin for rape and Justin denied the allegation, their narratives about what happened were nearly identical. They both agreed Marissa had said she didn’t want to have sexual intercourse. They both agreed that Justin penetrated her later in the night despite this. They both agreed that Justin became violent with her, hitting her with his belt and choking her. (Justin characterized this to administrators as being “kinky.”) 

The Title IX office sided with Justin, seemingly from the get-go.

Justin’s “proof” of consent was that he and Marissa discussed her birth control method and their last STI tests, and Marissa removed her clothing and consensually engaged in some sex acts with him. He also pointed to her responses to his texts the next day saying she enjoyed their night together. On her end, Marissa recounted repeatedly asking Justin to stop during their encounter. She recalled eventually performing the sex acts he wanted because she feared for her life as he became increasingly violent, and said she continued to respond to his advances over text because she remained fearful for her safety. This, Bedera told Jezebel, is a common trauma response among victims known as “fawning,” as victims feel compelled to flatter and appease their assailant out of fear. But there’s no requirement for Title IX administrators to have backgrounds in sexual assault research or working with victims, and consequently, few understand these complexities.

Justin and Marissa’s story is told in detail in Bedera’s new book, On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence, for which she spent a year observing the Title IX office of a large public university (which she calls Western University) and conducting 76 interviews with Title IX administrators and students. In the book, Bedera dispels deeply ingrained campus rape myths and puts the innate violence of the campus sexual assault reporting process into focus. “There’s this myth that men's lives are ruined when they're accused of sexual violence—it isn't just untrue, it becomes the justification for giving them benefits to compensate for that notion,” Bedera said. 

On the Wrong Side features over a dozen case studies, and presents an unsettling conclusion: Not only do assailants often go unscathed by Title IX reports, but they also reap academic, professional, and social benefits, Bedera found. “There was this pervasive thinking of, ‘I don't want people to think I'm unfair to the perpetrator, so I'm going to go above and beyond to treat them better than anybody else,’ so there can be no allegations of bias,” she said. 

“There’s this myth that men's lives are ruined when they're accused of sexual violence—it isn't just untrue, it becomes the justification for giving them benefits to compensate for that notion.”

Western University’s Title IX office received close to 500 reports during Bedera’s year at the university. Of those reports, a student was suspended or expelled just 1% of the time. The university suspends 3.29 students per year for gender-based violence; it expels just 0.71 students. (The only perpetrator who was expelled the year Bedera was there was expelled for threatening physical harm against a Title IX administrator, not the victim.) This is just the case of one university, but in her introduction, Bedera writes that students from schools across the country have asked her if Western University is their school—that’s how universal its Title IX office’s mistreatment of students is. 

Between the last three U.S. presidents, guidelines for how universities that receive public funding handle campus sexual assault reports have fluctuated. But no matter who’s in the White House, Bedera writes that universities can often manipulate the ambiguity and toothlessness of federal policies to take little—or, more often, zero—action in response to reports. Approximately one in four women undergraduates is victimized by sexual assault—an act perpetrated by one in 10 male college students, according to one study. But universities suspend just one of every 12,400 students each year for sexual misconduct offenses and expel one in 22,900.

'Himpathy' and neutrality

On the Wrong Side presents two terms that are fundamental to understanding university malpractice on campus sexual assault. “Institutional betrayal” describes the trauma that survivors experience when their university’s action or inaction creates new harm, compounding the trauma of sexual assault. Survivors of institutional betrayal, Bedera writes, “report traumatic symptoms similar to those of victims who were raped twice.” Another term Bedera introduces us to is “himpathy”—excessive, gendered sympathy for men at the expense of women. If a male student punches another male student, he could be immediately expelled; if a female student reports a male student for assault, he’s often perceived as her victim. “Himpathy” justifies benefits that perpetrators reap solely for being accused. 

Both these terms were exemplified in Justin and Marissa’s case. As is standard at Western University, once the investigation into Marissa’s accusation against him was underway, Justin was partnered with the Dean of Students’ office, which is well-funded and staffed with some of the most powerful figures at the university. Marissa, like all reporting students, worked with the victim advocacy office, which has a total of three employees, a one-room office, and a shoestring budget. The school agreed to Marissa’s request for a no-contact order to protect her from Justin’s harassment. But supposedly equal application of the order meant Marissa couldn’t talk about her case on threat of expulsion, so she couldn’t contact witnesses to gather evidence, or warn other women about Justin’s predatory behavior—even as she learned from classmates in her dance program that Justin had assaulted them, too. Meanwhile, the Title IX administrators maintained that the no-contact order didn’t impede Justin’s right to defend his reputation, allowing him to turn most Greek life students against Marissa and smear her as, in Justin’s words, “psycho” and “a ho.”

“No-contact orders show there’s no neutrality in cases of sexual violence, because there’s a huge power disparity between victim and perpetrator,” Bedera explained. “If you treat victim and perpetrator the same, you will always be enabling the perpetrator and empowering them to have more power over the victim.”

As Justin worked closely with the Dean of Students office, he built close relationships with university officials and they accommodated nearly all of his requests for support. He was able to retroactively drop classes he’d failed from semesters prior to the Title IX investigation. He was able to smear Marissa as a means of “self-defense,” while she was threatened with expulsion for warning other women about his violent behaviors. He even bragged to Bedera that he told the story of the Title IX case and his supposed exoneration on first dates, and women were “always willing to go on a second date,” often sympathizing with him. Justin also said he’d enjoyed “humiliating” Marissa by making her read her texts about enjoying their night together aloud in front of administrators at one point in the process. 

Meanwhile, Title IX administrators universally described Marissa as “annoying” and “dramatic” and suggested she’d lied. The Title IX investigation process requires significant labor, mental energy, exhaustive scheduling inconveniences, and more, on top of the trauma and social ostracism victims like Marissa find themselves navigating. But requests for accommodations from her were perceived by Title IX administrators as evidence she’d only reported Justin to advantage herself. 

Marissa appealed but wound up dropping the case when she realized her choices were to either continue pursuing it or graduate. Many victims ultimately recognize those as their options: The organization Know Your IX found that 39% of student survivors take a leave of absence, transfer, or drop out.

Weaponized absurdity

Because several other students accused Justin of violence after Marissa first came forward, the Title IX office declined to open investigations into these reports, lumping the cases together and concluding they were part of a coordinated attack against him. In other words, Marissa’s report protected Justin from investigations for additional Title IX complaints. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Bedera points to the case of June (all names in the book are pseudonyms), a graduate theater student whose partner, another theater student, raped and abused her over the course of months. June’s abuser was accused of a wide range of violent and predatory behaviors toward their classmates, but the Title IX office suggested June had coordinated this barrage of allegations, rather than the more likely conclusion that her abuser was a serial predator. 

So long as there’s room for the possibility that the accused student might have thought there was consent, the university won’t take action against them, several Title IX administrators told Bedera.

This speaks to another theme Bedera witnessed: the weaponization of absurdity and inconsistency to deny justice. The Title IX office stressed that it has no rigid policies or evaluation guidelines, instead handling each investigation on a “case-by-case” basis. On its face, this implies flexibility and compassion. Instead, this ambiguity justifies inaction in nearly all circumstances. Most cases conclude with “insufficient evidence,” even though Bedera found that most victims presented no shortage of evidence—therapy notes, screenshots of texts, even messages and voicemails featuring confessions. Victims were then told text confessions couldn’t be accepted because it couldn’t be proven they were really sent by the perpetrator. Yet, for Marissa, her texts telling Justin she enjoyed their night together were used as acceptable evidence.

Contradictions, loopholes, and warped definitions of consent were rampant across the cases Bedera observed. A college freshman named Gabriella was sexually assaulted in a dorm while she was unconscious after blacking out from alcohol. There were witnesses throughout the evening, including security footage of her assailant taking her to his dorm. But one Title IX administrator told Bedera that because Gabriella had left behind earrings at her assailant’s dorm, which he claimed she’d removed herself, it’s reasonable for her assailant to think Gabriella was consenting to sex. So long as there’s room for the possibility that the accused student might have thought there was consent, the university won’t take action against them, several Title IX administrators told Bedera.

Disbelieving administrators

Students report their experiences with gender-based violence to Title IX in pursuit of protection and resources. Victims want housing accommodations so they no longer have to live with or near their abuser. They want protective orders so they won’t have to see their rapist every day in class or at campus organization meetings. They want to feel safe. Instead, Western University’s Title IX office treated their reports as innate threats to male students, and opted to shield the accused—not the victims—accordingly. 

Many administrators expressed disbelief that campus sexual assaults were happening at all. One administrator told Bedera he “always had this perception that [sexual assault] only happens with a creeper in the bushes that jumps out.”

“Stranger danger” framing around sex crimes was part of the 1970s “tough on crime” era, mischaracterizing sexual assailants primarily as men of color and strangers to justify further investments in policing. (Instead, most acts of sexual violence are committed by people the victims know.) “It was this thinking that, ‘Someone on the campus is not the kind of person who would do this if we admitted them,’” Bedera said. Title IX administrators couldn’t seem to conceptualize privileged, male college students as violent criminals, because they didn’t fit the racialized, stereotyped imagery of—as that administrator put it—the “creeper in the bushes.” 

One administrator told Bedera she believed a victim was only reporting her assailant as “revenge” for his infidelity, ignoring a death threat the assailant had sent the victim. 

While perpetrators partner with the well-resourced Dean of Students office, the victim services office had so few resources that victims were implicitly or explicitly made to feel guilty for seeking accommodations. One victim, Chara, spent a semester couch-surfing after she reported her housemate for sexually assaulting her, and Title IX administrators stopped her from officially launching an investigation by warning that her assailant could wind up homeless, implying it would be her fault.

Guilt and gaslighting

The role of the university, Bedera points out, is to “treat students equitably and make sure students’ education isn’t impaired.” She continued, “Perpetrators are emboldened when they not only face no consequences for their violence, but also reap rewards.” Think: classroom accommodations, embellishments to their transcripts, protections from future or additional Title IX complaints, the opportunity to humiliate their victims.

“One of the things I really felt while doing this research was deep guilt, having to sit across the table from people describing their lives unraveling from sexual violence, and not being able to do anything,” Bedera said.

One victim she interviewed said that, at one point, she started video recording herself and her interactions with Title IX administrators “to ensure her version of reality could be trusted,” Bedera wrote. The victim went into the reporting process acutely aware that she’d been harmed and was in the right to ask for help. But through continuous gaslighting and carefully worded victim-blaming from administrators, this victim—like all victims Bedera interviewed—came to blame herself. Victims blamed themselves for providing insufficient evidence, for their behavior leading up to their assault, for procedural missteps while navigating an impossibly complicated process. 

But they hadn’t made any mistakes—they’d simply been betrayed by their universities.