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I have worked in victim services on college campuses for seven years and, since 2011, have been a faculty member whose research, teaching, and activism focus on addressing sexual violence among college students.
And for the past five years, I have led the development of a violence prevention center on campus where three women were murdered by domestic or dating partners in one year, and four years later, another domestic violence murder occurred.
In short, I witnessed a lot.
Few things embarrass and infuriate me more than the way the federal government is trying to intervene in sexual misconduct on college campuses, with politicians using victims and transgender students as pawns in their political power plays.
Title IX regulations are political. The regulations change depending on who is the President of the United States. This is ridiculous. To add to the confusion, the latest regulations, which were set to take effect on August 1st, have been temporarily blocked in 14 states and a recent Supreme Court decision has put the future of Title IX regulations, all Title IX regulations, in serious doubt.
Victims are hurt by ever-changing regulations. Administrators have no time to engage in effective prevention efforts because they must spend time and energy creating and re-creating policies and practices to comply with new Title IX regulations every few years. They are exhausted and burned out before they even have a chance to engage in educating students. They are constantly afraid of failure and are unable to effectively engage with victims and those who perpetrate harm on their campuses.
Moreover, the number of students involved in Title IX processes is tiny compared to the number of students who experience sexual violence. The vast majority of students do not report their experiences of violence to university administrators, not because administrators are not trying hard enough, but because the processes do not provide what many students want and need.
Many victims of violence tell us that what they need after an assault is to be believed, for the perpetrator to acknowledge the harm he or she caused, and for that person to refrain from abusing in the future. They are not looking for a punitive response to the violence. In fact, many victims say, “I don’t want them to get in trouble, I just want them to understand what they did and not do it again.”
Instead of listening to victims and intervening to change the perpetrators’ behavior, we have created a process that mimics the criminal punishment system to adjudicate abuse. This system further harms victims by prolonging lengthy administrative procedures and requiring them to interact with administrators who are instructed to be “neutral” in the process. Extensive research has documented the harms victims experience when attempting to engage in Title IX procedures, including re-traumatization and psychological, academic, and financial problems. For example, some students drop out of classes because the abuser was in their class and the process did not result in a resolution that the victim felt comfortable with. Others state they have had to wait longer to graduate or quit their jobs because of retaliation.
And this is exactly how this process impacts the victims. Those involved in harmful behaviors are not helped by this process either. Many people who engage in harmful sexual behaviors have some trauma themselves. They harm because they have not yet healed from their own experiences of harm or trauma. But the adjudication process is set up in such a way that instead of considering how their actions have negatively affected others, those who have harmed stubbornly resist and unwittingly avoid responsibility for the harm they have caused. This lack of recognition not only hurts the victims further, but also causes future violence to possibly increase rather than decrease, because those who engaged in harmful behaviors do not understand what they did wrong. Instead of trying to understand, they go into a defensive, self-protective space and are unable to acknowledge their harmful behavior.
So what’s the answer? First, there is no one answer. There is no policy that will get us out of this mess.
That being said, I wonder how different things would be if we put the work in the hands of people who work in higher education. Professionals who work on college campuses, especially in student affairs, have the educational background and training in the development and growth of college students. They have the experience to understand how the adolescent and developing brain works.
When I was a victim advocate (before the advent of Title IX offices), I often spoke with victims who chose to pursue accountability through the student misconduct process. This allowed the victim to work on healing even if the person who harmed them was not held accountable through the conduct process. Victims interacted with student conduct officers who were trained in student development, not compliance culture. Many of the victims I worked with felt listened to and believed by the conduct officers, and were able to continue on their path to healing without feeling like they were fighting.
At the same time, I know several students who engaged in harmful sexual behavior and were reported to the Student Conduct Office. Even though they were not found responsible under the policy, many of these students learned from the experience to change their behavior to avoid harm in the future. They recognized that they had done something to make someone uncomfortable and to go through a harsh process, even if their behavior did not rise to the level of a policy violation. They gained some empathy. I believe this is because the Conduct Officers treated them with care and responsibility based on their understanding of the student’s development.
The process wasn’t perfect — some victims felt victimized by an ineffective student conduct process — but in my experience, far more victims felt heard in these processes run by student development professionals than in adjudicative processes dictated by confused interpretations of federal policy and run by administrators who fear getting in trouble.
Three federal laws, Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Campus SaVE Act, dictate how administrators at higher education institutions must respond to sexual misconduct. Since April, I have received over 30 unsolicited emails trying to sell me something related to the effective implementation of the new Title IX regulations…and I am not involved in policy or response programs. I am involved in primary prevention. As a result of these laws and policies, administrators and educators spend more time and money staying compliant with policies than they do working to eradicate sexual violence. Many people who work in areas related to sexual misconduct are confused, overwhelmed, and afraid. They are not allowed to be thoughtful and nuanced in their approach to dealing with violence. Instead, they focus on doing it “right” so they don’t get in trouble. Where does this leave our students? They are equally confused, overwhelmed, and afraid.
Is it too late to roll back? I don’t think so. We cannot stand by silently while politicians use our most vulnerable students as pawns in their political games. Those of us in higher education know what we’re doing. We know how to hold students accountable with love and care. We know that constantly changing policies hurt everyone. We must stand up for ourselves and, more importantly, for our students, and fight back against a compliance culture rooted in control and fear, not care and compassion.
