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Something Was Wrong
S25 Ep22: Answering Community Questions with Dr. Nicole Bedera, Dr. Kathryn Holland & Dr. Jacqueline Cruz Part 2
00:55:12
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Podcast Host
Learn more@sling.com Something was wrong is intended for mature audiences and discusses topics that may be upsetting this season discusses sexual, physical and psychological violence Please consume the following episodes with care. For a full content warning, sources and resources for each individual episode, please visit the Episode Notes Opinions shared by the
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Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
guests of the show are their own
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Podcast Host
and do not necessarily represent the views of Broken Cycle Media. The podcast and any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. Thank you so much for listening.
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Jackie
You think you know me?
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Nicole
You don't know me well at all.
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Jackie
You don't know anybody till you talk
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Nicole
to someone.
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Podcast Host
A listener asked if I didn't understand
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Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
it was wrong at the time, does
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Podcast Host
that mean it was an abuse?
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Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
How would you respond?
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Katherine
This is Katherine, I can jump in and I want to say that this is something that is unbelievably common. The way that you look at or think about an experience that you had. If it differs now from what it was before, that doesn't mean that it wasn't abuse. That doesn't mean that it wasn't trauma. There are a lot of ways in which our sociocultural structures, norms, institutions actively work to try to convince people that experiences of harassment and violence are not actually bad are not harassment and violence. One of the primary things that I hear when people talk about either why they didn't want to report or why they were at first hesitant to tell people about their experience is that they weren't sure that it was bad enough. They weren't sure it was severe enough, that there's worse things that could have happened or other people have had it worse. Our social structures and institutions for so long have actively created the conditions in which people don't understand that abuse is abuse. You are not alone if that was your experience and it doesn't change what that experience was and its impact on you. We are dynamic human beings. How we see and experience things changes over time. A lot of time. With space gaining more knowledge and information. I would say with complete certainty that if you didn't understand it was wrong at the time, that doesn't mean that it wasn't abuse and that this is something that is extremely common and that is because of our social institutions and structures.
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Nicole
This is Nicole. One of the things that sociologists know has to happen for someone to come forward about their rights being violated is something called the naming, blaming and claiming process, where you have to be able to name what happened to you, you have to blame the correct person, and you have to be able to file the right type of legal claim. And in sexual violence, for all the reasons that Katherine is talking about, this is a really steep bar. This is a really difficult hurdle for survivors to get over because our institutions give us misinformation about what sexual violence is. Our culture gives us misinformation about what sexual violence is. And so when it happens to people, they have a hard time with that naming process and then the blaming process too. One of the reasons that it's difficult for survivors to call what happened to them abuse is because they've been taught to blame themselves. They'll say, what happened was violent, it was traumatic, it hurt me, but I don't know if my perpetrator if it was all his fault because I did this, I did that. And that's a big part of why rape myths are so damaging. That's a big part of why they're so prolific. They interrupt the naming, blaming and claiming process. And what researchers find is that if you can't name and you can't blame, then it's impossible to be able to write a claim that will be taken with any kind of seriousness. Because if you can't name what happened to you and blame the right party, how would you even go about reporting what happened to you? You wouldn't be able to do the most basic steps. This is just to say again, you know, to echo what Katherine's saying, this is a really big problem. It's really common and the repercussions in our society are really broad. And I also just want to say that it is not survivors fault when they can't name, blame and claim appropriately. Our entire social system is meant to make that process really hard. And it's common for it to be difficult. And that doesn't mean anything about the violence that transpired, except that it unfortunately took longer for a survivor to be able to get help.
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Jackie
This is Jackie here. I agree with everything that Katie and Nicole said. And the one thing that I want to add, I think we need to interrogate the idea that people didn't understand it was wrong at the time for all the reasons that Katie and Nicole are mapping out. There is a whole culture that is constantly telling women that the abuse that we experience in life is not worthy of being seen as abuse. And no one's gonna believe us. We should just deal with it. For that reason, I think a lot of people, myself included in my own life, have had experiences that happened to them where your feelings are like, I'm not exactly sure what this is, but I want to interrogate this idea of not understanding it was wrong at the time, because I think so often there is something about these incidences that people feel in their bodies that was not right. And this is why it sticks with people so long, that there does come a time where there is a recognition that it was abuse. There is some knowledge that we all have that something was wrong. And I wish that our society would catch up to empowering everyone to tap into those feelings more, in being able to follow those feelings through, to being able to say that what happened was abuse.
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Nicole
Jackie, I think you're right. This is Nicole, because I think there is a reason that the language that comes up is people saying, I didn't think it was that bad, which is this recognition that something felt off, but was it bad enough that it should merit other people to do things on my behalf to support me, to hold my perpetrator accountable? There's this sense of, if my life is not completely destroyed, if I was able to resist at all, why couldn't I have done more? Why can't I handle it on my own? Which comes from this idea that, as women, we are supposed to provide social support to everyone else, but that we are supposed to act as individuals and need nothing. And that's really the gender dynamic that's underlying so much of this. And even when the victim is not a woman, because it is a crime that is so feminized, other people will feel that, too, is something that I've heard from some male victims that I've interviewed as well. And so, Jackie, I think you're right. And the other thing that I just really want to reiterate is that we're all saying it, but this is really common. And a lot of the time, especially for survivors who are still in a violent context, it's not really safe to grapple with how violent things are if you don't have the support you need to make sense of that violence. This is the reason why a lot of people, they don't really reckon with the violence in, for example, an abusive relationship until they leave that relationship. And that's when they can really start to think things through and in a different way, because you can't be vulnerable like that around someone who poses a danger to your health and safety. It's just not safe. In the book, I talk about how so many of the survivors that I interviewed did not blame their university for what happened to them. They blame themselves. They had this perception that Title IX works for everyone but me. And the reason it didn't work for me is because I didn't report the right way. I didn't say the right thing. I didn't label it fast enough. They all had some reason that was keeping them up at night and that they were blaming themselves over. I didn't get to know everything that a lot of the survivors thought until the book was published. But many of them have reached out since reading the book, and so many of them responded by saying, wow, I did not know that everybody else was struggling with their grades. I didn't know that other people lost their housing. I didn't know that other people were failed by the Title IX process. I didn't realize that everything I was going through was the system as designed. And I am so angry. Some of that came from reading the book, and some of it came from just leaving the school. For survivors that had graduated or dropped out, whichever of those outcomes, as soon as they were away, it was sort of like leaving an abusive relationship, where they started to say that was messed up. And a part of why they could realize it was messed up was they could be more vulnerable. They were somewhere that was safer. But also they weren't surrounded by people who were justifying the institution's behavior anymore. I talk about this in one of the final chapters of the book with the example of Chiara, where she was the one survivor who was adamant the entire time that her school had betrayed her and it wasn't her fault. But she would go try to tell people on campus and express her concerns about Title IX, and her professors would defend Title 9. There would be staff saying they're just doing the best they can. There'd be people trying to justify why what happened to her was okay or why it wouldn't happen to them. Which is where a lot of victim blaming comes from is you tell somebody your story and they respond back with saying, well, isn't it your fault? I don't want to believe that we live in a patriarchal society where things this bad just happen on a regular basis and that there's nothing we can do to guarantee it will never happen to us. And so once they were removed from that specific university. Nobody felt a need to defend the university anymore. And the way that they would try to get that distance would be things like saying, wow, your school is really bad. I'm so lucky my school wasn't like that. We know as researchers, all of these schools are bad, just about equally bad to each other with very little variation, much less than we would have expected. But the main thing I want to communicate here is that the reason survivors struggle to name what happened to them, to label it as abuse and to be able to really reckon with it, the reason that that can come later, it has as much to do with the context you're living in as your personal, individual feelings about the violence at the time and in a different context. It's not surprising that somebody would later in life when they are in a different scenario say, actually, that was really messed, and that really hurt me. And I think it was abusive. Absolutely.
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Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
And I can't help but think of a Survivor who we'll hear from this season who we're calling Allegra. In your book, Dr. Badera, you referred to her as Marissa. And because we already had a Marissa this season, we went with a different pseudonym. Something that was so heartbreaking for me to hear from her was that she really thought highly of the university and her experience for the most part, until she read how the university viewed her in the book. I think it brought her a lot of clarity and healing, but it's just absolutely heartbreaking. The other thing I wanted to say is I was thinking of Survivor Marissa from chapter three this season. She shared that when she went to Title ix, one of the things that the Title IX coordinator there said to her was, well, thankfully it wasn't more violent. And so I think it goes back to those attitudes we were talking about, where below the surface is so much patriarchy and inequality that has seeped into our daily ideas and beliefs, that it shows up in so many insidious ways that I think even sometimes women have trouble recognizing it. And I appreciate the way that all of your work highlights that, and I hope that it will eventually help bring more people along on that journey. And one of the things I really love that you said, Dr. Badera, was about expanding the range of safe people. Something I always recommend to folks who reach out to me and they're like, I hear these stories or I read the news and I'm so pissed. What can I do? I strongly recommend just getting involved or volunteering somewhere and being in service to other people or doing what you can to support Survivors, There are always nonprofit organizations who are desperately looking for volunteers. Survivors mentioned throughout this season and behind the scenes that sometimes there were witnesses to concerning behavior or even assaults, but that other students didn't intervene. Why do you think that's so common?
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Katherine
This is. Katherine. There are a number of different ways that bystanders can intervene, whether that is directly with the person who is engaging in the behavior or whether that is intervening with the victim. There's different interventions that someone can do in a situation in which they've witnessed something. Bystander intervention training is really common on college campuses, and a lot of times it's viewed as it's going to fix all of the problems and that the only thing we need to do to address sexual violence is to have bystanders intervene. My qualms about that is, while on the one hand, having a bystander or a witness step in and intervene can make a really big difference in one individual case, that doesn't mean that it is actually, actually primary prevention, because there is harassment or assault already happening that then was interrupted. I think that institutions would do better to actually put more of their work into primary prevention efforts, because there isn't that same way of sort of calling out the perpetration problem on this campus is sort of like, we're all in this together, which is a better message than, I think, primary prevention at times. But in theory, bystander intervention can be something that is really helpful. There are a number of barriers that can hinder bystanders from actually intervening. It's an area of research where there is a growing amount of empirical evidence as to what are some of the different reasons why people do not intervene when they witness something happening. Some of it depends on the sort of specific context. So, for example, some researchers are looking at what are some specific barriers that come up when people are drinking, for instance. But there is this sort of normalization of sexual violence and sexual harassment in general that we've already been talking about. The things that basically tell survivors that what they experienced actually wasn't that bad. There is some concern about making things awkward. What if I get it wrong? There's also some potential concern about safety concerns, whether that's safety concern for the victim in that situation. Could I make things worse? Or safety for themselves of what would it mean for me if I came forward and said something? This often will manifest within a culture of mandatory reporting, where there is sometimes individuals who are designated as mandatory reporters on campus who are supposed to be reporting incidents that they see or hear about. They will Also express concern about that if I report this, I will also experience retaliation. And on paper, there might be a policy that protects whistleblowers, or at least minimally, a statement within a sexual misconduct policy that says retaliation is against this policy. But as you've already talked about earlier in the season, institutions do not do a great job of actually addressing retaliation when it happens. And so I think it's a combination of things, including the sort of social systems and pressures and structures, that makes people doubt what they're seeing is a problem. In some cases, it might be that they're just not sure about the tools available to them to be able to intervene safely. And so it's really common for people to experience barriers to stepping forward. In some cases, it could really make a big difference for someone. But the same kind of pressures that act on survivors also can make it difficult for people who witness it to come forward and say something as well. And even if they do come forward and say something, those reports are often disregarded, too.
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Nicole
This is Nicole. Katherine, that was excellent. That was exactly right. You covered so much of what I think needed to be said. And I want to jump on this to just tell a little story about how difficult it can be to be the namer. We just talked about naming, blaming, and claiming for someone to be a bystander and intervene, they also have to participate in some amount of that naming, blaming, and claiming process. And we really have this assumption in our society that no one can ever really know what happened in a case of sexual violence, even if you witnessed it. So to give you an example of this, before I did work for on the Wrong side, I used to do research on victims, and I used to do research on men, many of whom were perpetrators. And the first study was with men. I was interviewing them about the techniques they use to seek consent and how they go about seeking consent when they're having sex. And some of the stories that I heard from them were very clearly rapes where they were disregarding their partner's consent. They were doing things that their partner was giving them clear indication that they did not want to do. And when I tried to publish that research, finding I could not, because peer reviewers, many of whom are professors on college campuses who have witnessed violence and harassment and who likely have not intervened, peer reviewers would say, well, you don't know what was in the victim's mind. She might have been fine with it. She might not consider herself a victim at all. So to be able to call a man a perpetrator, even if he confesses that's not enough. You have to know what she thinks. So I thought, okay, I'm going to do research on survivors. I was planning it anyway. And so then I had stories of sexual assault survivors naming what happened to them as assault, saying it was traumatic for them. And then I got the same critique from peer reviewers, but switched a little, where they said, well, you don't know what was in the mind of the perpetrator. You don't know if he meant to hurt her or if it was just a misunderstanding or a mistake. Unless you hear from the perpetrator, you can't label this rape. As a researcher, you can see how then the next book I produced, I interviewed victims and perpetrators and the people in power in their cases at the same time. Because there's this idea that if you don't have perfect knowledge that if the victim and perpetrator don't agree that sexual violence took place, that. That everybody else should hesitate to do anything. When I was interviewing administrators for on the wrong side, a lot of what they would say, there'd be all of this evidence that to me, felt undeniable. It felt like plenty of evidence not only for the school to be able to intervene, but that they would be required by law to intervene. But you would hear administrators say things like, well, but can we ever really know what happened? And they would say over and over again, none of us can ever be completely certain about what took place. So that general ideology around sexual violence, that it's all in the eye of the beholder. And I think when it comes to bystander intervention, it ends up getting really sticky really quickly because you start seeing these arguments over who is the true victim. As a woman, I'm on a college campus. I see something that makes me feel unsafe. I would be upset. There is this real presumption that that's not enough for me to be able to say something, for me to be able to intervene, because isn't there someone, you know, the original victim, if she's okay with it, then you have to be okay with it. And it's one of the things that I've been trying to break down a little bit. And to say, you know, this is one of the things I end the book in around not endorsing mandatory reporting, not saying that we should all be doing this without any concern about the survivor's consent, but to say that if there are situations that violate community norms and all of the evidence is right in public, a bunch of people saw it. There's no reason to put the Burden on the survivor to be the one who has to go through this whole investigation process. One of the cases I think about a lot from the book was a case involving a victim. People on their dorm room floor had broken into their room, stolen a bunch of their possessions, and written gendered slurs on the whiteboard on the outside of their dorm room. All of the residents, assistants, all of the housing staff, Those people are technically mandatory reporters. And on paper, they should have intervened, but they didn't. Because there was this real sense that unless someone comes to me and the victim is the one who says that this happened to them, then everybody else should look the other way. And I think that's something we really have to push back on this idea that if you saw it happen and it violates the community standards, if it violates the principles of a gender equitable and safe environment, that's something that affects every single person in that community. There should just be some behaviors that the school doesn't tolerate, no matter what. That being said, part of what makes it so pernicious that we're looking to survivors to do the naming, blaming, and claiming process for all of us, and we put that burden on them is that there's still not a respect for their autonomy. So we have these scenarios, like where a survivor just says, I'm a survivor, and now is being forced into a Title IX process against their will, essentially as a form of punishment and as a way of policing survivor's free speech on campus and saying, well, you don't have the right to say that. Now we as the institution get to adjudicate whether or not we think you should be allowed to call yourself a survivor, Especially if you already know two or three people in advance who will agree with you and who can have your back. You should intervene every time you see something, every time that you're concerned, and in a way that prioritizes the survivor's autonomy and care for them.
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Katherine
There have been research studies that have been done that basically find that college men underestimate the other men around them. They're like, I see this as a problem, but I think that the other men around me do not see it as a problem. So there's this concern of, like, I see it as an issue, but I don't think everyone else does. I just wanted to say what Nicole was saying is that if you feel like something is wrong, other people feel like something is wrong too, and it is okay to say something because there's evidence that people underestimate how uncomfortable and outraged other People are, yes, Jackie, Here.
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Jackie
One thing that I wanted to really focus on is that so much of the public's approach to how sexual violence should be addressed is individualized. Oftentimes, the public individualizes a sexually violent act and sees it as this one thing that happened on this one campus, and there's an individual solution. Oh, if only this bystander had intervened. What we know about sexual violence on college campuses is that this is really a structural issue, that this is happening over and over because of many factors, but a lot of how our culture is structured, always having sympathy and empathy for male perpetrators, thinking about the role of women, how universities are structurally made up. There's policies and practices that make them environments where sexual assault is more likely to happen. You know, when we're thinking about how easy people jump to bystander intervention, for me as well as them, it's like thinking about these other things we can do to make communities safer. How do we change a campus community into one that is not okay with sexual violence happening, but is a campus community that is really saying, hey, we're going to hold people accountable for their violent acts? Or how do we change policies that could help create a community where violence is less likely to occur? Thinking about it more from this structural perspective than from this more individual act, which is how it so often is
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Nicole
approached, this is Nicole and I also think that the underlying logic of the institution that makes it hard for people to intervene is that the biggest risk is in underreacting. In something happens. The other person says, oh, it didn't really bother me that much, but that would be an okay outcome in comparison to. To the violence escalating, that person being hurt and nobody having said or done anything. An entire room full of people seeing this is a way that it's okay for people to be treated and violence is tolerated here. But I think the institution sees the biggest risk as overreacting and of people defaming a perpetrator or hurting his reputation, making him look bad or feel bad. That's part of the problem, is that this institutional logic that Jackie's talking about is very much at the odds of. Of the logic of bystander intervention, which, if anything, if we have to make a mistake in one direction, we want to be intervening and checking on things too much. Not. Not enough.
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Podcast Host
A topic that came up frequently in
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Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
our conversations with survivors this season was the confusion they felt surrounding informal versus formal resolutions. What does the research show about that? Is that confusion common?
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Nicole
This is Nicole. And yes, that confusion is very common. In part because it wasn't that long ago that informal resolution was not permitted on college campuses for cases involving sexual violence. Under the Obama era guidance, there was a prohibition on using informal resolution because schools were abusing informal resolution. Students would come to them and say, I was sexually assaulted. Please do something to protect me. And the school would say back, your informal resolution is this conversation you told us. Thanks for letting us know. Now, you don't get any kind of oversight. You don't get any say over what happens next. And we're going to give you a list of things that you can do differently to not get sexually assaulted again, which is victim blaming. And then there were other informal resolutions that put victims in a lot of risk and a lot of danger. So things like mediation can really exacerbate the power dynamics between victim and perpetrator and allow violence to escalate, especially in cases of things like intimate partner violence that can have a high risk of lethality. It's very dangerous. And so there's a period of time on college campuses where, as far as I can tell, they never really fully stopped handling issues informally, but they stopped telling students what it was. And they would treat it more like a way that they could convince students to stop the investigation process. And there was no formal definition of what they were doing instead or why they were doing it or what students rights were, because they were violating the regulation to do it. Now, under the Trump administration, with their 2020 rule, there is now explicit permission and a requirement that schools offer informal resolution. I was at Western University in 2018-2019. This was before that regulation took effect, but they'd already been doing informal resolution for years. And part of why it was surprising the survivors was because they'd been doing it under the table. And so it would have been impossible for a survivor to know what they were walking into when it wasn't defined. But even now, there aren't very clear definitions of what an informal resolution is or when it's over for an investigation. It's laid out that there are expectations of things like documentation and giving updates to the end of a case for informal resolution. There are none of those requirements. And so there isn't a lot of research into informal resolution so far because a lot of survivors don't even know that they did it. And so it's a really difficult thing for researchers to capture. In my research, I found that most informal resolutions amounted to essentially nothing, especially if they used this expansive idea of what's not allowed in informal resolution, which it's not allowed to be punitive. Things like an agreement where the perpetrator and the victim agree that they will not go into the same academic building during the same hours. The school I studied didn't even allow that for informal resolution. So the only things that they allowed at that university were educational measures, which sounds better than it is. The educational measures they offered were essentially someone from the Title IX office sitting down with the perpetrator and reading them the sexual misconduct policy and saying, any questions? I found in my interviews with perpetrators that they actually found these educational measures incredibly useful for being able to perpetrate better in the future. Because now they knew exactly the line to look for. They got more information about what the university would and would not do, would and would not consider to be violence. But most of the time, survivors that I interviewed were just told that everything they wanted was ineligible for informal resolution, and their cases were closed without their knowledge. What I would say now for any survivors who are considering an informal process is that you don't know what you're getting into. And that's one of the risks that the university is requiring you to accept.
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Jackie
This is, Jackie, I think that the idea of having an informal process is gendered discrimination. Because think about any other infraction that you would go and report. Your wallet got stolen, somebody punched you in the face, and then for them to sit down and say you thought that it was important enough to come and report. And now we're going to put you in the position of saying, well, actually, you could report it informally or you could report it formally. I think for most people, when they go to report, the steps to report in the first place is taking steps towards doing something formal. Why I call it gender discrimination is, I think, when it comes up in the case of sexual violence, because it doesn't come up in these other cases, There is just too much cultural baggage about what being a good victim or what being a good girl looks like in our society. And it is usually not standing up and saying sexual violence is bad. It is usually saying, I will go along with the system. I will not necessarily advocate for the best thing for me. That's our cultural framework. So you're taking somebody in a vulnerable moment and you're saying, hey, actually, you could do this thing that might be a little bit easier. That actually rarely benefits the survivor, but benefits the university to brush it away. To me, it's absurd that it even exists. I think it's so gendered, and I think it is so discriminatory because it is kind of what our culture guilts survivors to do in general. To me, it's very messy and it makes me angry.
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Katherine
This is, Catherine, in my perspective, the way that informal resolution in the case of sexual harassment and assault under Title IX has become another mode of perpetrating institutionalized gender discrimination. The combination of the lack of clarity and transparency around what informal resolution is, the less structure of what this is supposed to look like that Nicole mentioned, but also the active twisting of informal resolution in very deliberate ways to benefit perpetrators under the Trump administration's 2020 regulations, things like educational programs for perpetrators, which we know is just really not that useful whatsoever. It's just a way for the school to say that they've done something. Some schools like to claim that they're doing restorative justice processes, when how well they're doing those is still questionable. There's just not a lot of evidence as to what those look like. There are alternative resolution processes that actually have some kind of form and structure. And then there's also supportive measures. Supportive measures, corrective actions. These are different terms that Title IX guidance has used to talk about the other kinds of supports and actions that can help to remedy the effects of sexual violence and restore a survivor's access to educational activities, programs, benefits, et cetera. If you think about how sexual violence is at the heart of Title IX is the fact that this act is a form of gender discrimination and it has limiting this person's access to education, that simply removing a perpetrator, for example, might not be enough to actually address that problem and restore that survivor's equal access to education. What happened under the 2020 Trump administration, which was different from prior Title IX guidance, was the altern alternative resolution processes cannot be punitive, which means that if a survivor wants their perpetrator to potentially be suspended or expelled, removed for the institution, or terminated if they're an employee, that that automatically takes alternative resolution process, like a mediation or restorative justice, whatever, off the table. Additionally, the 2020 regulations required that supportive measures be offered to both survivors and the person who was named as their perpetrator as well, which is just underscoring this idea that essentially being accused of sexual violence is enough to undermine your access to education, because the whole purpose of supportive measures and corrective actions was to correct the harm that violence occurred. Research has found Title IX policies, they are much less likely to include any kind of details about informal resolution. And part of that is because the 2020 regulations were so detailed and prescriptive in the way that they wanted those formal grievance processes to look, it's been a combination of different factors that has come together to essentially make this a process that is seen as less risky for the institution and they're more likely to funnel survivors toward it because they can control the outcome much more and see it as less of a potential threat to the institution.
- [32:43]
Nicole
So this is Nicole. I have a few follow up thoughts. The first I want to say is that Katie's right. That informal resolution, it's become really fuzzy and fluffy on a lot of college campuses. And so some schools are now trying to insinuate that you have to go through an informal Title IX process to do things like get academic accommodations in a specific class and that this has to go through the Title 9 office. So I just want to clarify that that was not the case before and that that was not the thing that was banned by the Obama administration that actually the Trump administration has been trying to defang. Victim advocacy offices that were operating more independently and could give survivors things like supportive measures. They would do things like negotiate no contact directives and all this kind of stuff that we're talking about. They used to do that outside of the Title IX process in many schools. They still do to some degree, but fewer and fewer every year is what I'm finding. It was actually a massive loss to take all of these processes outside of a victim centered space and bring them into a space where victims are suspect and everything is seen through the lens of what are the stakes for the perpetrator? Is this quote, unquote, fair to a perpetrator? One of the other risks about supportive measures coming under the informal resolution umbrella is that if it's in a Title 9 office now, a Title IX investigation can be opened against your will at any time. Schools hesitate to do that. They don't do it very often. But in comparison to going to a confidential victim advocate where they cannot open an investigation, they cannot share anything you have experienced outside of that room. It's just a much higher level of risk that survivors have to entertain and accept to be able to do things like get help in their classes or get tuition back for a class that they failed because they didn't get support in time. Schools like to make it sound like it's an either or, that if you're opposed to informal resolution, then we're going to take away all supports for survivors. And that is not the system any of us are advocating for and it's not the system that existed before. This is a new problem that they created on purpose. The other thing I want to say is that one of the main reasons why survivors gravitate towards informal resolution is because of all the comments that we're hearing where the investigation process is so traumatic and so burdensome on survivors that they feel like informal resolution, it has to be better. I don't know that I would say that either process will avoid institutional betrayal as a guarantee. Most of them provide inaction, no matter what process you went to go there. And survivors still feel very hurt and re traumatized by what they experienced. But we have to name that. If the reason why survivors are choosing informal resolution, even if they are well informed, which again is very rare, but if the reason they're choosing it is because the investigation process would threaten their ability to complete their degree, would threaten their health and safety, would come with risks of retaliation and violence, then this is not a freely made choice for informal resolution. Even if we were to think of it in its best case scenario, it can't reach that while the investigation process is so violent, if everybody's picking it as their only option, that's not good. That's not survivor centered, that's not trauma informed, and it doesn't allow for any agency. Informal resolution is absolutely not that. A survivor says, this is what I want. And the school says, we're going to do our best to provide it quite the opposite. A lot of the time the school says, tell us everything that you want and need, be very vulnerable, trust us. And then they go through the list and cross all those items off one by one and say, can't give you that. Won't do that, won't do this, won't do that. And so it can be really, really painful too. Part of why informal resolution is a form of discrimination and gender discrimination is because it implies that the university's only concern about sexual violence is that it upset the victim and that if they can find a way to pacify that one specific victim, then it is okay to leave a violent perpetrator on campus, even if there's a risk they will reoffend, even if we know they're already harassing and assaulting other people, even if they're discriminating against other students on campus. One of the most common forms of sex discrimination on a college campus is from faculty. And there are things like a professor standing at the front of the room and saying things like, I think women make worse engineers than men. Even if all of the women in that room would be okay with an informal process and would agree that that's the way that they want to handle it, I would still say that the institution has an obligation to fire a professor who has loudly proclaimed that he discriminates against women, because that's not a decision that only affects the women who are in the room that day. The decision about what the university is going to do is going to shape things like how many women can get a degree in engineering, what classes they feel like they can take without experiencing discrimination, their sense of worth, their sense of competency, all of these other things that are so much bigger than that. One individual comment the reason sexual harassment is concerning is in part because it's upsetting for the people who experience it, but also because it's an indicator into the gender ideology of the person who did the harassing. Someone who's willing to say that in front of a class of students is almost certainly engaging in other types of gender discrimination too. And the university shouldn't be allowed to just wash their hands of that and say, well, some people thought we could handle informally, so I guess we're good.
- [38:16]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
I'm curious what advice you would give to someone who's interested in becoming a researcher, such as yourselves.
- [38:22]
Katherine
This is Katherine I love this question. As someone who loves research, one is if you are in higher education or you are about to be, look for opportunities to get involved in research. Working as a research assistant in someone's lab, doing an honors thesis or an undergraduate senior thesis. Because if you want to become a researcher, the typical next step will be to pursue a PhD program in an area PhD degrees are research degrees. That is a large component of what you do in a PhD program, and setting you up for success in a PhD program is going to be getting some foundational experiences with what research is like. Early on, I really recommend taking a look to see what is the research being done on your campus. If you see faculty members or graduate students who are doing research that you find really interesting, reach out to them. See if they have any work for undergraduate students. You can also reach out to faculty and graduate students who are not at your institution. I've had multiple students, for example, who have been involved in my research lab as research assistants who did not go to my institution. And also if you don't want to go to a PhD program, you can still get involved in assisting people with research, reaching out to see if there's any opportunities to volunteer in their lab. Find some research that you find really interesting. Contact that researcher to either talk to them about their research or what it might look like to get involved.
- [39:44]
Jackie
This is Jackie. My only addition to that would be that anyone who wants to get accepted into a program. One of the things that you could do is to be able to really think strategically and smartly about how these issues tie into so many other important issues. So thinking about how does this topic fit into other forms of study, such as looking at inequality in education or looking at gender inequality, and thinking about those bigger umbrella topics that this falls under, and making sure to make a really good argument for why this is important within the field, which is possible. I think when you take that approach, it's much harder for people to say no to you.
- [40:25]
Katherine
That is very true. Doing research in this area is not easy for a number of different reasons. And a lot of it is institutions being able to basically like throw up obstacles and blockades to be able to access the kinds of data that you might need to be able to answer these questions. Which is why researchers have often had to get creative in terms of how we actually study these topics. I would say don't necessarily let that hold you back. And if there's a question that you want to be studying and gathering information on to talk to other researchers who are doing that work in that area, because they can also help to talk about what are some ways that we could go about actually collecting the data, even if it's a difficult one.
- [41:04]
Jackie
Jackie, here I just wanted to add one thing, following what Katie is saying, also just being true to yourself and knowing what it is that you find important. Because I can tell you that many people over the course of my research, research told me that I should not center gender as much as I was. A lot of people had advice about this is a bureaucratic issue or other lenses. And I was saying no. Actually, the gender inequality aspect of my work is something that I truly, truly believe in. I really had to have self confidence in that I knew what I was talking about and to stay the course. Once people saw my research, that wasn't what they were saying to me anymore. They were very encouraging and supportive of my research. But getting to that point and getting people to believe in centering gender, it took some work. So much of the academy is telling us that we shouldn't tap into our lived experience. And I think that that is so crazy and such bad advice because I think it is our lived experiences. For me, I know it's my experience of being a woman in this world that made me able to stick to my own research and to probe a problem that people sometimes him for saying wasn't a worthy problem to look at.
- [42:18]
Nicole
We live in this era where it's the do your own research. And people call themselves journalists just because they have a big TikTok following or whatever it would be. That's not the same as being a researcher. Research is a really specific set of methodologies, values. There are lots of things that when you come at this work from a researcher lens, surprise you. I think people, when they hear us talk, will think that we've known this stuff the whole time. We had this feeling in our gut of what we would find in our research. But all three of us have been surprised by things that we have found. And most commonly the way that I've been surprised is that things have been worse than I expected. That we sort of sugarcoat sexual violence as a topic. People speak in euphemisms, they're not super clear. And people have been told to feel a lot of self blame and shame about what they've experienced, which leads them to not tell us the whole story because it hasn't been safe to tell the whole story anywhere else in their life. And so I agree that if you want to be a researcher, you really should get a PhD. I also agree that a lot of the training that you need will not come from the academy because my work has been suppressed in a lot of ways. I know that others on this conversation have felt similarly at times as well. I'm not a professor right now. And part of why I'm not a professor right now is because it was really hard to get a job at an academic institution studying what I study. There were a lot of concerns that bringing me into a sociology department would be too radicalizing. But what I want to say is that you'll need training outside of academia too. And the training that I'd recommend is actually the same trainings that we've been talking about to be able to do volunteer work for rape crisis centers. It's something called a 40 hour crisis counselor certification training. At this point, they're more accessible than ever. They are. A few times a year you need to do one for your specific state. And so you can just search the name of your state. So I'm in Minnesota. I would search Minnesota Coalition against sexual assault. 40 hour or crisis counselor training. It'll come right up. They are intense. Usually they run about 40 hours as you might figure out by the name, but over the course of two weeks. So that's two weeks of 20 hours of training. It is all encompassing. It is difficult. But I will say all of the best sexual violence researchers have that background in a 40 hour training, have that background in victim advocacy. Because it teaches you things like trauma, informed interview techniques, and gives you a baseline of information about sexual violence that you will not get from an academic program unless you are incredibly lucky and end up in one of the very few programs in the country where there is a class about research methods and sexual violence. They're rare. And then the other thing I'll say is that on this note of retaining your soul and retaining your values, because there will be a lot of pressure to not publish those inconvenient truths. You have to have your people, you have to have people who agree and who will share those convictions and can do things like give you really good feedback. We get so much bad faith feedback from researchers in this field, people who want to shut down the conversation before they even read the research. I've had the same experience Jackie has where researchers have tried to push me to do other work, and then once they read my work, they said, wow, this is so important. But you need those people who are going to help you get to the point that you have the data that will convince everyone else and will make sure that what you're putting out is sharing your values, things like respecting survivors, autonomy, being honest about sexual violence. There is a lot of pressure even in academia to share this misinformation that people don't know is false. They just think that this thing about sexual assault that everybody says it must be true. And sometimes that's what shows up in my peer reviews or grant reviews. The way that I met Katie is we were in the same lab group for a little bit of time. The way I met Jackie is she reached out because she heard we were doing similar dissertations and just wanted to chat. I've met people at conferences, but don't look at other people who are doing the same type of research you want to do as competition. They are your collaborators and you will really need each other to get through it.
- [46:14]
Katherine
This is Katherine. And one last thing that I'll say related to finding your people and getting the training that will be really essential for doing this kind of research is that my PhD was joint in Psychology and Women's Studies. I'm currently jointly appointed in Psychology and Women's and Gender Studies. It was my education on research in women's and gender studies that really fundamentally shaped the way that I approach going about research and the way that I think about it. Definitely look for women's and gender studies programs, critical race studies programs who are on the campuses, because the scholars who are in those areas, obviously not across the board, but often have A much sort of deeper historical connection to approaching research from a critical way. And I don't mean critical in terms of like criticizing. I mean thinking very deeply and thoughtfully about the way that we actually go about research, power relationships within research, what that looks like, especially if your sort of primary area is one that doesn't have as quite of a long history in terms of thinking about research critically.
- [47:13]
Nicole
This is Nicole. While we're talking about activism and things you can change, Women and gender studies and critical race studies departments are under fire in this political environment. One of the things you can do to help support researchers like us is doing things like go to school board meetings. They're mostly full of people who are opposed to this type of research. My book has been banned in countless university libraries. I've been banned from giving talks in multiple countless universities across this country. And a lot of how that happens is that there's nobody there who says that they have an issue with it. Often I'm going up against one person who said that they think my book is bad or they think my research is bad and that it's dangerous and it shouldn't be on a college campus, the school being criticized. It's really easy for them to say, great, we want an excuse to keep this off campus. But they also will say things like, well, there's nobody here to defend it. And so showing up and defending those of us who are doing the work already is hugely useful, because right now it really is. It's the author versus a whole slew of conservative groups that are just trying to silence us and trying to erase our research. We're living through a period where it's not even just that it's hard to produce the research. There is a desire to destroy the research that already exists. And so one of the things everybody can do is just keep an eye on these issues. And if there is a meeting about it at your school board meeting, if you heard something about it at a university, just show up, express your concern, and a little bit of dissent would go a really long way.
- [48:40]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Thank you all so much for sharing all of your expertise so generously. Your perspectives are incredibly valuable and we're so, so grateful to have you. I'd like to end by hearing again where folks can follow each of you individually and what you've recently published or are working on that you're excited about.
- [49:01]
Katherine
This is Katie. I am terrible at social media, but I do make sure that my Google Scholar profile is always up to date with my research and has all of the articles that are available on it. You can find any of that work there. And if any of the articles are behind a paywall and you want to access them, just send me an email and I can send a copy of that. One project that I am especially excited about right now. Me and my fantastic graduate student, Rebecca Howard Valdivia just recently published a really large mapping review of over 100 studies that have been done on Title IX and sexual violence in higher education that is basically looking at how have schools been implementing Title IX policies and how effective has that been at addressing sexual violence? Spoiler alert. They have not been effective. That was just published earlier this year. It's called Title IX and Sexual Violence in Higher Education A Mapping Review and Assessment of Policy Implementation and Effectiveness that was published in the Journal of Sex Research.
- [50:02]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Incredible work and it couldn't have come out at a better time for me. So thank you for that. Dr. Holland.
- [50:09]
Nicole
This is Nicole. I am spending way too much time on Blue sky these days, so you can definitely find me there. My handle's Bidera. I'm around talking about sexual violence whenever it comes up in the news. I find that that's one of the times I when it's easiest to reach people to talk about sexual violence is when they're already thinking about it and they want to know more but they're afraid and they need someone who can take that trauma informed approach to talk about it. That's what I do on my social media. Occasionally I talk about research and stuff like that too, but it is mostly response to the news and giving context. Aside from that, Jackie and I work together at a consulting group called Beyond Compliance Consulting. And one of the projects from research that I did through Beyond Compliance and that I have coming out, we were just accepted for publication, is a study about how social media websites respond when survivors ask them to take down non consensual images like revenge porn or deep fakes. Big surprise. The big finding was that they engage in institutional betrayal. We all know that a lot of this stuff is happening in these online spaces too, and that the online spaces are responding horrifically. And I want to say that it's actually a more radical paper than I think a lot of people outside of academia or discussions of the Internet would know because the idea that we're labeling social media websites as institutions can be regulated is a really hot topic right now. And so we're very excited to be having it come out. The other thing that I want to talk about that I'm sure Jackie will touch on a bit too, is that we are trying to open our own national rape crisis center for college sexual assault victims called the Survivor Alumni Network. We are in the very, very early stages, but the thing that we could use help with right now is finding people who would want to volunteer to give us information about what happened at their schools and the way their schools handle sexual violence. You don't have to tell us your whole story, but, you know, if you have documents or things you learned about that Title IX process along the way, we really want those. And we also are trying to find people who would want to volunteer and do that training to become victim advocates that we would then train to be specialized in campus sexual violence. So if you're interested in that, we'll send a link that hopefully we can have in the show notes where people can just express their interest. You might not hear from us for a little while. We are in the very early stages, but we know a lot of the listeners might be interested in something like that. So we want to hear from you if you want to help us out.
- [52:28]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
So exciting.
- [52:30]
Jackie
Yes, this is Jackie, and I'm also terrible with social media, but I am very lucky to be in a partnership with Nicole, who is great at it. You could hear more about our work through the Survivor Alumni Network links or through our consultancy, Beyond Compliance, Anti Violence Consulting. That is a great place if you wanted to connect with us about our work or you were interested in or you had an issue in your organization that you wanted some feedback on. That's a great place to reach us as well.
- [53:00]
Podcast Co-Host / Interviewer
Thank you so, so much. This is all very exciting. It feels like such an honor to be able to connect with y' all this season. I've learned so much through your words and your efforts, and I know the listeners have, too. Your work and your research and your willingness to engage in these stories in such a thoughtful and nuanced way means more than I can truly express. And I think these kinds of conversations are so, so important. I hope that for all the young people listening to the podcast who are entering into college next year or the years following are going to be able to take these tools forward with them. So thank you so much for the impact that you've had on myself and our community.
- [53:44]
Nicole
Thank you for having us and thanks for bringing this conversation to so many more people as well.
- [53:49]
Jackie
Thank you so much and thank you for just addressing this issue and bringing more attention. I know people in my life have been listening in and learning so much. It's a really nice way to get research out to audiences.
- [54:07]
Podcast Host
Thank you so much to each and every survivor and guest for sharing their experiences with us and thank you for listening. Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media production created and executively produced by Tiffany Rees. Thank you endlessly to our team Associate Producer Amy B. Chesler, Social Media Marketing Manager Lauren Barkman, Graphic artist Sarah Stewart, and audio engineers Becca High and Steven Wack, Marissa and Travis at WME AudioBoom and our legal and security partners. Thank you so much to the incredibly talented Abayomi Lewis for this season's gorgeous cover of Glad Rag's original song you, Think youk from their album Wonder Under. Thank you to music producer Janice JP Pacheco for their work on this cover recorded at the Grill Studios in Emeryville, California. Find all artists socials linked in the episode notes to support and hear more. More. If you'd like to share your story with us, please head tosomething was wrong.com if you would like to help support the show, you can subscribe and listen ad free on Apple Podcasts. Purchase a sticker from our sticker shop@broken cyclemedia.com Share the podcast with a loved one or leave us a review. Want to stay up to date with us? Follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Something Was Wrong Podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe. Friends.
- [55:41]
Nicole
Someone.