122: Addressing Sexual Violence on College Campuses is Easier than You Think with Nicole Bedera
Today’s topic carries a degree of sensitivity, so consider this a trigger warning if you are sensitive to discussions about sexual assault and sexual harassment. Our focus is on how universities and workplaces are dealing with these issues–and how they can do it better. My guest is Nicole Bedera, a sociologist and author with a Ph.D. Her upcoming debut book is On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Predators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence.
Show Highlights:
Nicole’s background as a victim advocate in the criminal justice system
College as the entry point into an adulthood of privilege for perpetrators of violence
The biggest challenges for universities regarding sexual violence
Title IX: where it all began in 1980
Punishing perpetrators AND meeting the needs of survivors—can we do both?
Power, punishment, and consequences
Nicole’s surprise when she dug deeper into sexual assault cases
The myth: Sexual violence only happens from evil men.
White supremacy history and sexual assault
Barriers to justice and societal norms
The truth: Perpetrators rarely change their behavior.
The research shows that a lot of men will stop perpetrating IF they know there will be negative consequences.
There is little accountability on college campuses for perpetrators.
The need to create safe spaces for survivors over perpetrators
The Brett Kavanaugh scenario
What we CAN fix to have huge ripple effects
Resources and Links:
Connect with Dr. Nicole Bedera: Website, Twitter, and On the Wrong Side book
Connect with KC: Website, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook
Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning
We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes.
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KC Davis 0:05
Hello, you sentient balls of stardust. Welcome to struggle. Care. I'm your host, KC Davis, and today we are going to talk about something that is a little bit of a sensitive topic. So just sort of putting a trigger warning out there, if you couldn't tell by the title, we're going to be talking about sexual assault, specifically sexual assault sexual harassment, and how universities and workplaces are dealing with it and how they can deal with it better. And our guest today is Nicole Bedera. She has a PhD. She's a sociologist and an author. She has an upcoming book called on the wrong side, how universities protect perpetrators and betray survivors of sexual violence. Nicole, thank you for being here.
Nicole Bedera 0:43
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
KC Davis 0:45
So tell us a little bit about yourself, like, how did this kind of become your area of expertise?
Nicole Bedera 0:50
Yeah, so I started out as a victim advocate, actually, and I was working inside the criminal justice system, specifically in the hospitals with meeting with victims during forensic exams, which you might know was a rape kit. So a lot of the time, I was one of the first people that a survivor was asking very basic questions about what happened to them. Why is sexual assault so common? Why is it happening to so many people? Why did it happen to me? Is it something I did? And for a lot of people, it was their first window into what happens if you try to report and it doesn't look the way people expect. If you watch a lot of SVU, you're pretty horrified when you see the way it actually works. And so they would ask these really simple questions around, why does it work this way, and is this a good way to do it? I'm kind of surprised by what's going on. And at the time, this was about 10 years ago, a little more than that, the academic literature wasn't very well developed to answer those questions. The questions that we had were mostly victim blaming, or the answers that we had were mostly victim blaming, they were things like, well, here are the risky behaviors you behaved in, and this is why you are in the situation you're in. And it just didn't feel right to answer that way. We were not trained to answer that way either for what it's worth, but the other response of saying we just don't know didn't feel satisfying either. So I decided to get a PhD and study how sexual violence happens in our society, why it's so predictable, why so many of these cases look the same, and also why our responses just aren't working for survivors, and why it's so rare for survivors to get their needs met when they come forward. I ended up on college campuses mostly just because college is the entry point for the most privileged adults in our society to learn the norms of adulthood. So if violence is normal on a college campus, it's gonna feel normal in a workplace, if it's normal for your school to sweep things under the rug, you'll expect that in your family, and you might that might be something you teach your own kids. And that's why I focus on college campuses, not because I think they're particularly unique, but because it is that entry point for the most powerful people in our society to be thinking about violence and thinking about their role in violence perpetration and violence response and in being victims too.
KC Davis 3:01
Okay, thank you. Here's kind of where I wanted to start, right? Because you're talking about how universities can be responding differently, and I want to start with like, what are some of the challenges that universities face when they're trying to address these issues of sexual violence? Because I think that one of the things that I think about a lot is I'm someone who like when someone tells me you know I was victimized, I believe them, but I also am not a person in charge of punishing the person that victimized them, and so just as a member of society, I've almost never met someone who says that they were sexually victimized that I didn't believe because, yeah, yes, I believe you. We believe victims, but if you are actually a person in charge of, like, handing down decisions that change people's lives, you know that's why we have, like, a court system when it comes to actually doing those sort of things. And it strikes me that, like, universities are in this weird in between where they're not a court system, but at the same time, they are making decisions that are affecting people's lives and futures and and I guess I just want to kind of start with what are some of the challenges that universities are facing when they're trying to deal with these things. I think
Nicole Bedera 4:20
one of the biggest challenges is exactly what you're talking about, which is they see a survivor coming forward as something that's bad for a perpetrator, and they see survivors as an object as evidence, which a part of how they've ended up in this place is not because the law requires them to do this. I want to be really clear about this. Everything I say today, schools could do better tomorrow, if they want to. They have so much flexibility in how they implement federal regulations around Title Nine and sexual violence and sexual harassment. But the issue is, they've been trying to mimic the criminal justice system. You. Even though the reason our schools are supposed to care about sexual violence is totally different than the criminal justice system. So the criminal justice system is focused on punishment, but if you look at the law of Title Nine, and it's the same thing in your workplaces too, but schools and workplaces are supposed to care about sexual assault, because if they don't do something about it, it creates a hostile environment for other women who cannot be safe in that space, and for the victims, we know that if, for example, they are forced to share space on campus with a perpetrator that really negatively impacts their academics and the academic opportunities that are open to them. So the entire title nine process on paper isn't supposed to be about punishment. It's about civil rights. It's about making sure that just because you were sexually assaulted doesn't mean that then you have to change your major, or you have to be the one to move out of your dorm to get away from this violent person, or that you have to be the one to sacrifice all of these opportunities. The original court case that about Title Nine, that said that schools have to care about sexual violence, was actually about these issues. So in this court case, it's called Alexander V L, if there any nerds that want to look it up, and it's from 1980 so it's been around for a while. And what happened in this case is that there was this culture of sexual harassment at Yale University, where professors would ask women for sexual favors in exchange for high grades. And it happened to such a degree that even women who had not received that kind of solicitation didn't feel like they could go to office hours, felt like something unsafe might happen. And that is the court case in which the judge at the time, you know, declined to hear the case because all of the students had left campus by that time. It's one of the big challenges in this particular field, as students move through pretty quickly. But he did write that it was really reasonable that if sexual violence is happening on college campuses to the point that victims and women more broadly, have to have a smaller experience, and they have to avoid some of the opportunities that then are open to only men as a result, that that's a form of sex discrimination. And so the biggest issue that I think campuses are dealing with right now is they're still thinking about what they should be doing in terms of the perpetrator and punishing the perpetrator and using the victim as evidence, as an object in the perpetrators story, where they're the main character and the victim is the side character who's trying to keep them from graduating. But that's not why victims come forward, and that's not the way they should be thinking about sexual assault. They should really be thinking about how this type of violence and having to share space with a perpetrator can make it hard to complete an education. And if they thought about it from that perspective, we'd have a really different system than the one we have right
KC Davis 7:45
now. And do you think that there's a way to you've said, like, okay, it's they treat it like it's about punishing the perpetrator. Do you think that if universities treated it not as punishing the perpetrator, but more as meeting the needs of the survivor? Is that separate from punishing the perpetrator, like if a survivor's needs is, I need to not see this person, or I need to be in safe you know that, like one of us has to move? Is there overlap there? It depends
Nicole Bedera 8:12
on how you think about punishment. And I actually think that abolitionists are the people we should look to, because they're very clear on what is punishment and what is consequences? And I think sometimes we think of things as punishment for perpetrators when they're actually just the natural consequences of committing an act of violence. And so one of the things that Maria Macapa writes that I think is really great. If you're not familiar with her work, you should get familiar. And it's worth noting that she started her work as an activist about campus sexual assault. That is where her beginnings come from. So she's very, very well aware of these issues, and one of the things that she says is that expecting a perpetrator to give up a position of power is not a punishment. They might not like it, but it's a consequence, and that in comparison to punishments which are inflicting suffering and cruelty. The intention is to sort of teach someone a lesson or to make them hurt for what they've done to someone else. A consequence is just recognizing, you know, we really can't trust you in this position of power anymore, because if we leave you in this position of power, you might hurt more people, or you need this position of power to perpetrate abuse, which is something that we don't think about it very much that way, but that's really true that one of the most common types of sexual violence that happens on college campuses is a professor sexually assaulting or harassing a graduate student, where they're their advisor. And so for anybody who hasn't been through a PhD program, it's really different than an academic advisor in an undergraduate setting, your PhD advisor literally decides when or if you graduate, and they have so much power over that decision that if they can hold that over you, they can get you to do a lot of things that you wouldn't agree to otherwise. And so in this case, saying, you know if you're sexually harassing students, we can't trust you with advising graduate students. It's not. Much about teaching the perpetrator a lesson. It's a form of harm reduction. It's a form of saying, We don't want you to be in this powerful position that you are abusing to hurt other people. So to go back to some of the examples we've been talking about before, things like switching dorms. You know, I don't really think of it as a punishment to say that if you perpetrate a sexual assault, you have to live in a different dorm, or that you can't live on campus at all. I see that as a consequence, which is that if we don't do this, the victim will be the one who feels like they have to leave. And that's another thing that I think a lot of the time, whether it's a college campus or workplace or wherever, people aren't thinking about quite the right way when it comes to sexual violence, they seem. I think the most generous read is to say that they want to be able to keep both people to say, you know, violence has happened. Can the victim and the perpetrator just both find a way to stay in this workplace, to be nice to each other? But that isn't something that is physiologically possible for the victim. It's never safe for a victim to remain around their perpetrator, and victims do it, let's be clear, victims do it, but it always brings on a series of harms, things like being more stressed out. Victims that are forced to share space with their perpetrator are more likely to have PTSD, anxiety, depression, sleep difficulties. They're more likely to develop chronic stress related conditions like migraines, back pain, heart disease and cancer. So even though people can do it, it's with a cost that most victims will eventually opt out once it's safe for them to do so. And so the decision we're really making is not, how can we keep both people? It's Which one do you want to keep? And that's where I really hesitate to think about these interventions as a punishment for the perpetrator, because it's just a natural consequence of violence, and we're deciding, is that borne by the victim? Are we going to keep making things harder and harder for the victim? Are we going to say this is just the way things are now the perpetrator is the one who made the decision to be violent, and they're the one who should bear the consequences of being violent.
KC Davis 12:06
And I feel like all that makes sense, and but I want I'm wondering is, like, there's nothing that you're saying that I disagree with at all, especially when we're talking in the theoretical where, like, we definitely know in our theoretical like, who the perpetrator is who the victim is. And, like I said, I don't think I've ever met a woman I didn't believe, but I'm thinking as a university like, do you think that that's why the universities, sort of, like, mistakenly try to replicate the justice system, not only from the punishment perspective, but from the like, what are we supposed to do if, you know, one person is saying it happened and the other person is saying it didn't, and now we have to choose who are we going to keep and they're like, I would assume they're equally worried about, like, what if I make the wrong decision on either side of those things? And so is there a way that I can almost like, you know, soft peddle, some in between solution, right, where I'm keeping them both, or I'm making them compromised so that I can avoid having to basically, like, pronounce who I think is telling the truth. Like, how do universities handle, you know, that aspect of it? Because that's kind of the part where it seems like they're trying to be the court system, where they're, like, looking for the evidence and trying to figure out what really happened. And I guess I'm wondering, like, does that have to be a step in order to serve a survivor? Or, like, how are universities handling that aspect of it? So I want to answer
Nicole Bedera 13:37
that two different ways, because I think that there are two different answers. I want to be clear from the beginning that there are a lot of things that survivors need that don't involve a perpetrator, that we don't need to adjudicate whether or not they're being truthful. We know the research is so clear that overwhelmingly they are, that when people make false allegations, researchers like me, we know what they look like. And one of the one of the things that people don't realize is that most false allegations do not name a perpetrator, and so for the most part, when a victim is coming forward about a specific person, that is a trustworthy claim, the big exception to that is when perpetrators who are facing accountability proceedings accuse their victim of violence, which is something that's been on the rise. Debt the herd is a really good example of this, but that too experts, which I think it's fair to say that our HR departments, our title nine offices, they should become experts on these issues. We can recognize these patterns. We know what they look like. And so in the case of these types of retaliatory complaints, it's that there is a victim who is speaking out first, and that the perpetrator is really trying to recast their self defense or things that they are doing, like speaking out in the first place as defamation, as violence, even though that's not the victim's goal. One of the things that we look for when we tell apart victims and perpetrators is is this person trying to get away from someone and maintain their autonomy, or are they looking to control? Someone and control what they're allowed to do. And sometimes, to an untrained eye, those things can look similar, but to a trained expert, they're very, very easy to tell apart. And so in a lot of scenarios, we should just believe victims and we should give them what they want. I think in the context of things like workplace accommodations, like something that really helps victims of stalking is to be able to be late to work sometimes, so if their stalker is outside their door, they don't have to walk past their stalker or else they'll lose their job. And that can actually make it harder for stalkers to stalk. If the victim is no longer going to be leaving there outside the front of their door at the same time every day, then they can't predictably be there to have an interaction with the victim, right? Something like that. I don't think we need to even adjudicate whether or not something happened. It's an easy thing to be more flexible. We should just be more flexible in cases where the perpetrator is involved, where we're asking for something like for the perpetrator to be removed from a specific place. My personal opinion, an expert opinion, is that we should err on the side of believing victims, that in this period where we're figuring out what happened, we should put protections in place. And those may need to be temporary for a period of time, but we already, you know, it's funny, we actually kind of already do this in the criminal justice system with things like protective orders. We there's a temporary period where the protection is so life saving and so crucial that we put it in place immediately and then revisit it later. And there are a lot of things that I think schools should be doing that way, and it's worth noting that they already do this for other disciplinary procedures. If a straight cisgender man punches a straight cisgender man on campus, they put that person on suspension until the case is over. That is the way a lot of schools already handle this. We're making an exception for sexual assault and treating it differently than other cases of violence on campus.
KC Davis 16:48
Well, I would imagine there's probably quite a bit of misogyny that goes with that, right, which is like, Well, women aren't as trustworthy, women are hysterical, women are vengeful, all these things. And I do think that, like when you say, you know, universities are trying to mimic the court system. They don't need to do that. I feel like your answer really illustrated that you have to deconstruct that on several levels, right? Like, your first point of like, it's not about like, it's not about the perpetrators on trial and the victim is the evidence, right? It is, there is a survivor that we are serving, and we need to think of it that way. But even deeper than that, when you were talking about how there are so many things that don't have anything to do with whether or not you are aren't doing anything with the perpetrator, like so many needs that you can meet. And then I think your third point of like there are things that you can do in the interim that err on the side of safety, and we should probably always err on the side of safety. And it seems like if Title Nine has made it legally a university's job to address these issues, then they are beholden to have experts, or to learn the expertise that you know in order to make those kind of decisions about, you know, what does it look like when someone reports, and how can we go about this in the safest way possible? Yeah,
Nicole Bedera 18:17
and I want to say too that underlying all of this is this myth that school administrators and the criminal justice system really want us to believe, which is that all cases of sexual assault or He Said, She Said, and that there's not enough evidence to be able to make a good decision. But one of the things that I was really surprised by during my year at a university, which is what the book is about, I spent a year observing these processes from the inside, interviewing the victims, the perpetrators and the school administrators. So I really got to see all sides of this issue. And one of the things I was most surprised by is how much evidence there actually is in a lot of these cases. It's the digital age. People are not just talking in person. There are text messages, there are emails in cases of sexual harassment, especially, you know, I did all this work before the pandemic, but I could imagine even more so in 2020 when a lot of classroom interactions were moving on to zooms that were being recorded, that you have all of these messages that are right there. There's no question about what happened a lot of the time. And I actually start the book with a case like that. So there was a case of a graduate student who she attended a networking event on campus, and the keynote speaker took a real interest in her somehow dug up her email address, she doesn't know how, and started offering to be her mentor. And over a course of text messages and emails, it escalated into sexual harassment and some actions that started to resemble stalking, that he was not leaving her alone. When she was saying she wanted to be left alone, there was some escalating threats and those sorts of language, and she was worried he was going to start showing up at her house and things like that. In this case, the title nine office sort of replied by saying, we can't possibly know what happened. We would need. Interview him, we would need to know his side of the story, but everything happened in text messages and emails, so there's actually no question about what happened. And I was surprised by how many cases look like that. Now, I think maybe there was some truth in the past that it was hard to find evidence in these cases, but that really isn't the case anymore, and even in cases where a victim and perpetrator went into one space alone, and that's where the violence took place, I was really stunned by how often the perpetrators narratives of what happened mimicked the victims, but they had been trying to convince investigators that what they did should just be considered okay and that it's not that bad. And this makes me think of research I did in the past where I interviewed young men about how they seek consent, and this phrase kept coming up, which was, well, it wasn't rape, it's just non consensual. And so what they would do when they were saying that something was just non consensual is they would come up with reasons that a victim deserved what happened to them. And so if we can cut through that victim blaming and say there is no scenario in which something non consensual is okay, there is no victim who deserves this, well then it's a lot easier to make the right decision. You know, one of the cases I talk about in a lot of depth in the book is one where I did interview everybody involved, and at the very beginning of both the victim and the perpetrator's statement, they both recognized that before the sexual assault occurred, the victim had clearly communicated she did not want to have sex, and the perpetrator agreed that they would not have sex, and yet that case still ended in what the school calls insufficient evidence, because They were looking for all of these complexities. And there's actually a term by another researcher named Jackie Cruz, who I work with very closely. She's very smart, but she calls that. That's what she calls it. She calls it orchestrating complexity, looking at cases that are clear, cut and straightforward, and trying to find reasons to justify inaction. Because it makes us feel guilty. It makes us feel like the bearer of bad news to be the one who says to a perpetrator, you know what, you have violated our Code of Conduct. You are not someone who is safe to be in this community, and we actually think you should leave people feel guilty about it, and a lot of the reason they feel guilty about it is because so many of us have been socialized our whole lives, that men are valuable, that men's space needs to be protected at all costs, and that we need to find a way to, you know, lead them in the right direction, as opposed to setting firm boundaries with them well. And I
KC Davis 22:34
wonder if that's connected to not only are we socialized to think all of that, but we're also, I think, historically, socialized to believe that sexual violence only happens from evil men, like it's only like conditioned to believe that sexual violence is so abhorrent that it only happens from an evil person. And so then you're looking at this person, and you're going, well, they don't seem evil. And you're looking at even some of those areas where you know we have this idea that rape is holding a woman down while she screams. And I just wonder how many people you know when you get in the position to have to navigate these you're in a position of leadership when you come across realizing that, like most of these cases, are not like that, and they're not ready to sort of look at the reality that like no like people that you might relate to do things like this. And I even wonder if part of it is like people in power needing to distance themselves from the idea that they could ever be capable of something like this, like it needs to be this crime that only people who are completely othered would ever do. And it's a little too close to comfort to realize, oh shit, this is a mistake I could have made right in college, right? Or maybe I have made well,
Nicole Bedera 23:59
and I want to shift the framing on that a little bit, because the research is pretty clear, people do not sexually assault people on accident. We've known that for 40 years that and it gets back to the same thinking that I talked about in my research before, that when men are confronted with things they've done that they know that they hurt somebody, they know it wasn't great behavior, they'll make these artificial distinctions of it's not rape, it's just non consensual. That's what that looks like, where somebody will say, I know I was hurting that person, but I thought I was allowed to do that.
KC Davis 24:28
And that's what I mean, is it's not that, like I thought rape was okay, and it's not that I thought what I was doing was okay. It's I knew what I was doing wasn't okay, but in my head, it wasn't rape, it was this other non okay thing that I could justify as not being the taboo thing that I should be punished for. So you shouldn't really punish me.
Nicole Bedera 24:49
That's exactly right, and that's where the white supremacy history comes into play, right? Because this idea of rape being something that comes from a stranger in the bushes is really a racialized. Class history intended to cut down on what was considered to be loitering by free black men. After the abolition of slavery, there was an idea of, if they're public, they're dangerous, but there was nowhere private for them to go. They didn't have private property because of slavery, right? And so that's where a lot of our modern ideologies about sexual violence and who its perpetrators are come from. It's this idea of black men, poor black men in particular, are who we think of as perpetrators of sexual assault, whereas wealthy white men who are doing the same thing to their spouses, to their children, well, we want to exempt that. And so that's where we get this distinction that a lot of us, we don't talk about it in a racialized way a lot of the time, but that distinction between stranger rape versus acquaintance rape, that's a way of saying, if we're the insiders, if we're the ones in position of power, if you know us, then it doesn't count. This is a way that we can treat women and children and transgender and non binary people as well, while also being able to hold this double standard for men of color in particular. And you see that dynamic on college campuses too. There's a real sense I heard this rhetoric around the stranger in the bushes or the creeper in the bushes from a lot of administrators saying that's what we thought all of sexual assault was, which, again, is a real indication that these administrators are not the experts they need to be, because that is sort of sexual violence, rape culture, 101 stuff is that stranger rape is really rare, and the most sexual violence happens between people who know each other. I learned that on my very first day in victim advocacy training, probably in the first 10 minutes, and I knew it before I got to that space too. And so it's a reflection of how little they know, but it's also their way of saying, you know, if somebody has the class privilege to be able to afford to be on our campus, they're not the kind of person we expect would commit sexual assault at all. And that really is the way they're thinking about it. Is anybody who has any kind of privilege, you know, that's the only kind of person that we admit. And so if they're here by default, we don't think that they could do something like this, and that's part of why school administrators feel so guilty. It is exactly what you're talking about. It's not what they expect it to look like. And I was really stunned by how many of them didn't expect that sexual violence was a real problem on college campuses at all. There's a lot of research. Well, there's a little research on this that when we do surveys of people who work in higher education, they don't think of campus sexual violence being a real issue despite all of the conversation in the media. And even if they think it happens at other schools, they think it doesn't happen at theirs. And so if that's the mindset of the person who's adjudicating a sexual assault, of course, their response is to be shocked and to have a hard time believing it. And that's a really big theme. And what I saw is just this disbelief of Wait, people really act like this here. If it were this bad and this violent, wouldn't I know? But it's just so normal that, no, we don't see it very clearly well. When
KC Davis 27:52
you said at the beginning of our conversation, you know, to be clear, these are things that could change tomorrow. Like, I think that when you know, as someone that really doesn't know a lot about the inner workings of how colleges are handling these cases, or what the data looks like of these cases. I know from my perspective. You know, if you ask me, like, what do you think the biggest barrier was? Like, I would say, I think it would be hard to try and figure out what's really going on and feeling this burden. Like, you don't want to unfairly punish someone, but you also don't want to ignore a victim. And what if you make a mistake this way? What do you make? And I think that that it seems like that's a myth, yeah, like that is not the barrier. Like, the barrier is not it's difficult for us to know what's going on. The barrier is truly things that could be changed if people just wanted them to change enough, and if people would get educated, and if college campuses would just, like, take five minutes to figure out the best evidence based way to approach this.
Nicole Bedera 28:53
I think that's exactly right, that, yeah, the problem isn't that we don't know what's going on. It's that we don't want it to be true, and that the perpetrators aren't the people that we hoped they would be. This is the way I feel about the metoo movement in general, and a lot of our conversations about sexual violence in society. Something I say to my students a lot is that everybody thinks sexual assault is wrong. Everybody thinks rape is wrong up until the perpetrator is someone they already know and love, and then there's a real hesitancy to support survivors. And I see this at my research with survivors all the time. If they do something like just tweet out me too, I've been sexually assaulted, they'll get support from everyone in their lives. But if they name a perpetrator, and the perpetrator is someone who is in their family or in their friend group, they will find themselves pushed out because people have a really hard time grappling with it, and people just they don't. A lot of people don't think that this is a good reason to stop being friends with somebody. A lot of people just don't think that sexual assault is a good reason for someone to be expelled from school. And I think that's our biggest challenge, is making the really strong case that it actually is a very good. Reason to end your friendship with somebody if they've committed a sexual assault, especially if you are friends with the survivor too, and if the survivor can't be safe and can't spend time around you, if every time you have a birthday party, you're inviting their rapist, you can't really be surprised that then they're the one who's gonna end up leaving their social situation. And that's one of the things that we're increasingly finding as sexual violence researchers, is that how sexually or how traumatic sexual assault is isn't determined by the physical violence itself. The thing that determines how traumatic sexual assault is is how the victim is treated once it's over, and a lot of victims their entire life unravels because everyone in their lives is focusing on being fair to the perpetrator. And I put fair and big air quotes there, because saying you can't be friends with me is a pretty fair boundary to set. There's this real there's this myth that when somebody is accused of sexual assault, it will ruin their lives, and that everyone in society will shun them and turn away from them. They'll lose out on every opportunity. Researchers actually find it's the opposite, that being accused of sexual assault confers benefits on perpetrators, that everybody is sort of thinking the same way, thinking everybody else is going to take the side of the victim, so I'm going to be the one person who takes the side of the perpetrator, but everybody is thinking that everybody is protecting the perpetrator, and before long, it's the victim who's the one who disappears. One of the studies that, you know, I can never unread it, and I'm glad I read it, but I hope other people feel the same way, because it feels like something that's fundamentally unfair. There's this study where they it's called an audit study. So what they do is they create these fake resumes that are identical, except for a couple of different you know, the name will be different, and then a couple of different details, and they will show them to participants and say, Would you hire this person? How much money do you think they deserve? And in this case, the detail that was different was that one person had been accused of sexual harassment in their last job, and the other person had been the victim of sexual harassment in their last job, and participants overwhelmingly preferred to hire the perpetrator and to pay them more money. And so that is actually the normative view in our society, is that we really do side with perpetrators, thinking that we are giving them a second chance. And I just want to be clear that, because that's such a norm in our society, perpetrators really change their behavior. They have no incentive to do so. They have a lot of people giving them credit for something they haven't done, and it's really, really important that we do hold them accountable in meaningful ways. And I say this not just from a moral perspective if it feels like the right thing to do, but also from a pragmatic perspective. One of the things that we also know in the research is that the places that are safe where sexual violence doesn't occur are just places where it isn't tolerated, and one of the reasons that that happens is because most perpetrators of sexual violence are looking to impress other men. Most perpetrators are men, and they're looking to impress other men. So if they're in a place where, when they sexually harass someone, a co worker says, You know what? That's funny. I think that's hilarious. I want to work with you on more projects. I want to promote you. Then, of course, that's going to quickly turn into an environment where a lot of sexual harassment is happening, and that is the main reason that men commit these acts is to bond with other men. The Kavanaugh case is a really clear example of this, where we haven't heard of many stories, not to say they don't exist, but we haven't heard of many stories of Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting women privately. We hear stories of him doing it publicly to entertain other men who are laughing. And so when we instead of giving benefits to perpetrators, when we instead say, that's the kind of person I'm not inviting back to this party, that's the thing that creates safe places. And one of the things we see in the research is that a lot of men will stop perpetrating if they know there will be negative consequences, instead of positive ones, because they feel kind of ambivalent about the violence itself. So
KC Davis 34:06
you know, even if you are someone who is worried about or thinks it's important to give second chances, what I hear you saying is the best way to give someone a second chance, the best way to give someone the opportunity to change and grow is to have zero tolerance. Yeah,
Nicole Bedera 34:24
I say this a lot to people who, again, coming from a very well intentioned, well meaning place, they find out that a friend of theirs has committed sexual assault, and they say, but if they don't have support, how will they ever change? One of the things I say most often is, well, you were in their life when they committed this act of sexual violence, and so the presumption that you're the right person to push them in that direction, you know, it's a big assumption. Are you maybe somebody who tolerated their violence? Are you somebody who, you know, if you keep them around, are you sending them the message that this is an okay thing to do and this isn't a deal breaker for you? I. And we don't have a lot of studies on what happens to individual perpetrators when they face boundaries, in part because it's so rare, it's hard to study. You would be really hard pressed to find a group of men who committed acts of sexual violence and did not benefit from that violence. So it's an open question, but I do think it's worth trying. I do think that the research we have so far around organizations that are safe would tell us that if a perpetrator going back to the college campus, example, if they're expelled and they have to go to another school, at least, they have to make new friends when they get there. And because of the way a lot of our campus organizations work, they might make really different friends. You know, it can be difficult to rush a fraternity as a junior. It can be difficult to join an athletic team as a senior, if you've already completed so much of your education. And so we know that the perpetrators on college campuses, they're really concentrated in a few places that they are overwhelmingly places that are very masculine or male, only that they are competitive and that they're hierarchical. So places like you know exactly where I was talking about before fraternities, where you have a hierarchy within them, and the rushing process is competitive. Football teams where there's a captain, there's a hierarchy of which string are you on. But also places like the marching band have pretty high rates of sexual violence perpetration too, even there, where you have individual sections being male dominated, and there's a hierarchy of first chair to whatever it's chair. So knowing that a lot of these organizations, because they are so hierarchical, you have to start at the bottom and move up, having a perpetrator start in the middle often means they have to go somewhere without that kind of hierarchy, and they might make different kinds of relationships that might be safer for them. The best predictor of whether or not a man will be violent is whether or not he is friends with men who are misogynistic and so disrupting those friend groups is a pretty good idea. Actually, it is a good way to potentially give somebody a second chance, which
KC Davis 37:08
I do think you know, back to your conversation about punishments and consequences, I think that is exactly those two things to marry together. I think are exactly how we should be thinking about things like dispelling fraternities. You know, there's been lots of cases where, you know, a survivor comes forward and says, you know, this happened at a fraternity house or at a fraternity party, and the college has disbanded the fraternity or kicked them off campus for however many years until basically nobody who's involved in that fraternity would be around when they were allowed back on campus. And you know, you hear kind of that side of, well, what about people that didn't do anything, and what about it's important for how men need to bond, and they need the support or whatever. And but I think going back to what you just said, which is, like, disrupting those social groups is the most beneficial thing you can do for the survivors, for the community at large. And it sounds like even for people who are in that social group to prevent them from perpetrating or from kind of going in that direction. And I think when we think about consequences versus punishment, that I think that's another helpful way, because when we talk about punishment, we have this big thing about like, Well, you shouldn't be punished if you're not the perpetrator. But consequences are different. You can suffer a consequence of someone else's actions. Victims
Nicole Bedera 38:28
do it all the time, and we're really comfortable putting that on victims
KC Davis 38:32
exactly like if you're participating in a in a group, in a culture, then yeah, you might suffer the consequences of the perpetrator being from that group or that culture. And again, like disbanding those groups, not as a punishment, but as a like a risk, honestly, like a restorative, a restoration of community of like, the best thing we can do, because we know that there is some toxicity being bred here, is to disrupt it
Nicole Bedera 39:01
exactly. And you know, another thing that is sort of lurking in the background of this conversation is when we talk about something like disbanding a fraternity, we don't usually talk about all of the other opportunities for connection that will open up for its members. We think about it as you know, if you're expelled from this one university, then that is the end of your education. But it's not one of the things that I think is a strength of the work that I did is I got to interview the perpetrators too, including, you know, the one perpetrator who was expelled that year. And this is just a fact, I like to sneak into as many interviews as possible, but people are really concerned that the campus sexual violence proceedings are unfair to perpetrators, but your average university expels one perpetrator every three years. It's actually really, really rare for them to hold a perpetrator accountable in any meaningful way. When they do hold perpetrators accountable, still, the most common way they do that is by deferring sanctioning until after graduation and by. Saying you will be suspended, but only after you graduate, which is a non sanction, right? It's which is nothing. It's nothing, and it offers the victim nothing. Because often what happens in those cases is it's not safe for the victim to be on campus, so the victim takes a leave of absence, and the victim is the one who acted as if they had been suspended for two or three or however many years. And so that's sort of the reality of things right now. But to get back to what I was originally saying on this point, which is that there's this idea that when somebody is expelled, which again, is really, really rare, that this is the end of the road for them, that they will never get into another school. That wasn't true, that is not true, the perpetrators just go somewhere else. And that's upsetting in its own way, that the perpetrators just go somewhere else, and that there's no sort of the stigma that we think will be there for perpetrators of violence doesn't exist, and that schools aren't thinking about the safety of other students that schools really do. They don't hesitate to bring these men back onto campus. They often think they do a lot of victim blaming. They'll say, Oh, well, the particular victim who led them to violence, who made them act violently, they won't be here, so they'll be safe in this space, which is victim blaming. And it's not true. The one perpetrator who was removed school that I studied, he'd been removed from at least one other university before that, and so the idea that he would go somewhere else and be safe somewhere else. That was certainly not true. But all this being said when
KC Davis 41:23
we see this in other places too, like you see the police officers get fired and just go get hired by another, you know, police department. You see doctors who get lose a license, move to a different state, and
Nicole Bedera 41:34
part of the reason for that is because we don't have a lot of schools that have different social norms, and so they go into a school that kind of acts the exact same way. They fall in with similar people. So a big part of this whole thing I'm thinking of working is that we have to have schools that are committed to safety and to holding a different standard of their students. And that's a big part of making this type of change, too, on the prevention side. But the thing that I find kind of freeing about this reality, because we know what's horrible about it, but the thing that's kind of freeing about it is I don't think we have to worry too much about what happens to the perpetrator. Will their life be ruined? Because overwhelmingly, they're welcomed with opened arms wherever else they go. And so we really can think from an abundance mindset, when we say we're going to disband this fraternity, well, those men will be able to find other friends. They'll be able to find other social groups. The whole world is huge, and I think this is most visible when we talk about a really common thing that victims want. Actually, the most common thing that victims want in studies is to never see their perpetrator again, to never be in the same place as them again. And people will get really caught up in thinking That's so unfair, because what if the perpetrator wants to be where the victim is? And my response to that, after conducting this study, is they can be literally anywhere else in the world. If we're saying they can't be in the place where the victim is, that is one place at any given time that they can't go. And so we're getting really fixated on this one place when the whole rest of the world is still open to them and they are okay. And I think it helps us a lot to remember to be accurate about that and to stay grounded in reality, that when we hold a perpetrator accountable, we tend to feel guilty thinking, What if everybody else does what I do? But that's not the world we're living in. The world we're living in where this is maybe the only place they're going to be held accountable, and the rest of the world is open to them. So don't think about that. Think about the part that's only in your control, and the part that's in your control is things like creating a safe place for survivors so that they can stay instead of the perpetrator being the one to push them out.
KC Davis 43:38
Well, and the idea that college campuses are privileged people's first introduction to how the world is going to treat them is obviously very powerful when you think about a survivor, but when you think about a perpetrator, and I mean, is there some, you know, degree of men that probably are straight up sociopathic evil, like the kind of sure, but I think the majority of cases, it actually is kind of hopeful. That's not the majority of cases, because what that means is it's not about creating a society that has this really specific mode of identifying and punishing and segregating. And you know, what do we do about this? But it is the case that we might actually be able to prevent people from becoming perpetrators, if we get them at this developmental time in life where the institutions have no tolerance for it. How many of these men go on to be serial perpetrators, as you said, because the first time it happened, they're fine, and the men around them like it, and there is no fallout. And it's like, well, sweet, I like this experience. I can continue to do this right. Like, and how many times have we heard of cases where. But you couldn't find that person's first perpetration in their early adulthood. And to me, that's kind of hopeful, as if you are someone who wants to think from a restorative justice standpoint of like, this isn't like we could prevent this,
Nicole Bedera 45:16
right? And it makes me hopeful for that reason, for sure that taking a sociological perspective, because that's what I am. I'm a sociologist, one of the reasons I was drawn to thinking about violence sociologically is it feels like a losing battle if our form of sexual assault prevention is trying to change the hearts and minds of individual rapists who are getting benefited from committing violence and who are in positions of power in our society. Again, thinking about Brett Kavanaugh as an example, there is no world in which I over here on my little spot, am I going to be influencing the way he thinks and the way he acts? He's so powerful in this society. And that's, I think, one of the realities we don't think about very much when it comes to sexual violence. We tend to think about it when people are young, because that's when perpetrators tend to be sexually assaulting people who they are not married to. But when we think about sort of the next phase of violence as something that happens privately, in the home or in workplaces, where there's such a big power imbalance, people can't come forward, you know, it is really important to think about catching people early and teaching them that this is not an appropriate way to behave, and thinking about it sociologically, it just feels a lot more doable to me than having like a new round of potential perpetrators come up and going to them one by one and saying, We know that you'll be rewarded if you do this, but we hope you won't. Please don't. It just doesn't seem like it's gonna happen. But the other thing that I find really helpful about all of this, and that makes me feel very grounded, is that a lot of the time, people throw their hands in the air and get overwhelmed after violence has happened, and they say when they feel backed into a corner where they don't know what to do, what they'll eventually say is it would be better if we prevented it altogether. It's too late to help this victim. There are no good outcomes. And one of the things I like about this way of thinking about it is we never reach that place. We never reach that place where it's too late, because there's recognition that how damaging the sexual assault is is still up in the air for the victim, and that we can actually make violence less traumatic for victims if we give them support and inclusion and we try to keep their life from unraveling. And so for me, that feels helpful because it gives us an agenda like gives us a clear directive about what to do. And so we're not just coming up with what do we think is the right response that feels punitive enough or harsh enough against perpetrators, but instead, we're letting our response be guided by what will give a tangible benefit to the victim, what will make this better, and that, to me, also feels more hopeful. So we have the hopefulness around the prevention of perpetration, but also the hopefulness around restoring access to society for victims, making sexual assault less damaging, retaining women in places where currently we are hemorrhaging women. And there's one study that finds that one of the best predictors of whether or not a woman will complete a major in a STEM degree is whether or not they have a sexual violence history, and that it kind of makes sense when you think about all the stress structures that are involved that a lot of our STEM degrees in college, they include weed out classes, and if you were sexually assaulted the same semester you take organic chemistry and the perpetrator is in your class, then, yeah, there's a good chance you're going to fail that class, and there's a good chance that you're going to have to change your Major, and you're going to probably have to go into a major that's more female dominated, because those majors tend to be more flexible and more understanding about the types of things you're going through, whereas all the other majors that mostly cater to men just aren't really thinking about what survivors need. You know, you start to see very quickly how when this violence is happening with adolescent women, queer and trans people, that it leads to a lot of other segregation in society too. And that gives me a lot of hope as well. To say, Wow, if we could fix this one thing, if we could move in this one direction, the ripple effects might be a lot bigger than we think.
KC Davis 49:17
Yeah. And I think to your point, that just because the assault has already occurred doesn't mean you've missed the window of prevention, because preventing Fallout, preventing the post traumatic issues like you still. We're still in the world of prevention, with still so much that we can do,
Nicole Bedera 49:38
and we actually know a lot about what to do. We know a lot about what survivors need in the aftermath of violence. They need agency because sexual violence, it's not traumatic because it causes physical injury. Most of the time it doesn't the reason it's traumatic is because there's a loss of bodily autonomy, and that is inherently one of the most traumatic things. We can experience. And so part of how we heal it is giving survivors power back, respecting their agency, respecting the things they say they need. And so part of why survivors are traumatized by sexual assault in its aftermath is because when they go to their friends and say, I really need you to not invite my perpetrator to your birthday party, because I want to go and the thing they hear back is, well, I'm going to prioritize that person ahead of you. That's again, denying that agency. It's denying their assertion of what they need to be okay. And so we know that that kind of stuff makes a huge difference, and that the more that we create stability in survivors lives, the more that we tell them that they're valuable, that they are valued members of our society, and that we will put them first, the better they do. And it's something you can see really clearly in this college context, especially when students are trying to report there's this academic concept that's so useful, created by Jennifer fried, called institutional betrayal. And institutional betrayal is defined as actions or inactions taken by an institution that exacerbate trauma. And there's a list, and I have the list in the book. If you want to see the whole list, it's in the book, but there's a list of the things that we know exacerbate survivors trauma when we respond that way, and they are things like mishandling a reporting process, responding in ways that make sexual violence seem more likely in the future, responding in ways that tell the victim that they are not valuable, or they're not as valuable as another person, very commonly, their perpetrator. And the thing about institutional betrayal is it's not that it's just a bad thing or that exacerbates trauma a little bit. We actually find in the research that when victims experience these types of reactions, it exacerbates their trauma at the same severity as the violence itself. So another way of putting this is that survivors who experience institutional betrayal look the same on surveys as someone who was sexually assaulted twice in a very short period of time. And so when we're talking about how much we can take these burdens off of survivors, it's really significant. We're talking about reducing the trauma by half, or more than half. That's a huge thing to be able to make, just make it easier for somebody who's experienced sexual violence, to be able to show up the way they want in their lives, to be able to fully participate in our society. And again, that makes me really hopeful, because that's something we can do. We don't have to be going to perpetrators and trying to get convince them to do something different. We can just make their violence less damaging on our own without trying to involve them at all. And I say that not because I think it should be our job, but because I'm realistic about who is most committed to this work. I know that we are the ones who are most committed to this work, and so it feels nice when we can do it without needing the permission of the people who are causing harm. Well, Nicole,
KC Davis 52:53
this has been such a great conversation. I feel like I just took like a master class in such a difference in what I knew before this hour and what I know now. If you guys want to check out the book again, it's called on the wrong side, how universities protect perpetrators and betray survivors of sexual violence. Nicole, where can we find you if we wanted to do you have a website? Do you have kind of ways to follow your journey and your work?
Nicole Bedera 53:18
I do. I have a website. It's just my name. Nicole badera.com, I'm also on Twitter and trying out blue sky. I'm really, really trying this time, because I don't know how much longer I can stomach Twitter. But the other thing that I just want to plug here is that if you are someone who this all sounds really good to you, and you're involved in an organization that's trying to end violence within it, no matter what type of organization it is, we know all types of organizations have violence within them. The other place you can find me is I just founded a consulting group called Beyond Compliance consulting. We're very selective with our clients. We like to work with people who don't just want to meet the bare legal minimums for helping survivors and addressing sexual violence and gender discrimination. We work specifically with people who want to end it, and that is their goal. And so if you want to meet us for that, we'd love that too, and we're just beyond compliance consulting. Awesome. Well, thank
KC Davis 54:06
you again.
Nicole Bedera 54:07
Thank you for having me. You.