One of the most common panicked emails I get from professors is:

“I just found out I have both a victim and their perpetrator in my class. What do I do?” 🧵 To start, I just want to recognize that this is way more common than people think. Sexual violence is perpetrated by people in the victim’s social circle.

In college, it’s really common for that social circle to be their major.

Given Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail, I'm going to write a thread that I've been thinking about for a long time.

We all know the myth of the Black rapist and the white victim is racist. But I want to get into how it's sexist too. For context, I started thinking about this during my dissertation on college sexual assault.

This myth came up a lot during my interviews with Title IX investigators. But not in the way you might be expecting.

Biden's new Title IX regulation will be in effect this year. With the expanded mandatory reporting requirements, our students are going to be more hesitant than ever to access school resources.

As professors, that means we have to support them more ourselves. Here's how. The primary thing survivors need from faculty is help managing their schoolwork.

The problem is that our go-to toolkits don't usually meet survivors' needs.

It’s August. And that means that Biden’s Title IX regulation is now in effect.

And it required *all faculty* to become mandatory reporters.

Survivor advocates opposed this change. Let me tell you why and what you can do about it in your classroom. The research is clear. Mandatory reporting doesn’t reduce sexual violence. It actually *decreases* investigations.

Its primary function is to strip survivors of their agency. And surveil them.

I am old enough now to start seeing the men we forgave in our teens and early 20s go on to continue abusing other women and children.

And they’re just more dangerous now. They have more power. Their victims are just as (or more) vulnerable. And the violence is more severe. In a few cases, they have literally killed people. There is no coming back from that harm.

If we had known this is what they would do with their “second chances,” it would have been obvious we had an obligation to stop the cycle of violence instead of perpetuating it.

Since I couldn't get into the long-term impacts of educational disruptions in my book, I want to get into it here.

Here's a list of things that can happen to sexual assault survivors after they take a leave of absence from college: The first thing that happens is they have to start making payments on their federal student loans. And if they fall behind on those payments, then they can't re-enroll until they're current on them.

One of the most alarming findings in my research is how affirmative consent has been weaponized against survivors.

Instead of expanding the list of actions that mean "no," I found that investigators only looked for actions that they could consider to mean "yes." In one example, a victim had specifically told her perpetrator at the beginning of the evening that she did not want to have sex.

And he confirmed to investigators that he had promised her that they wouldn't have sex.

Sexual assault perpetrated while the victim is asleep is much, much more common than most people think.

I have interviewed so many women who woke up to a boyfriend, family member, or trusted friend sexually assaulting them. @AngelBunny_9 (And that's exactly why perpetrators choose sleeping victims--there are so many ways to gaslight victims as a way to avoid accountability. Sleep is so vulnerable.)

Today, I'm combing through the sexual assault cases in my dissertation that involved alcohol.

I am stunned by how many of them took place in the victim's bedroom after she tried to throw a safe party at her own house. These women were intentionally trying to avoid the dangers of the party scene. They put a lot of thought into who they trusted to drink around them and who they invited into their home.

In our society, we have all been taught that rape and intimate partner violence are wrong, but most people can't really pinpoint why.

Here's a list of (some of) the impacts these acts of violence have on survivors across the life course. You might already know the psychological consequences of violence. Survivors are more likely to have anxiety, depression, PTSD, and difficulties with sex and sleep.

After spending years researching sexual violence in organizations, @DrJackieCruz and I are excited to announce we're going into business together!

At Beyond Compliance, we are ready to work with people who are committed to making change.

beyond-compliance-consulting.com Beyond Compliance came out of a problem that we ran into when we presented our research:

We met people eager to make their organizations safer, but lacking the expertise to make it happen on their own. And they struggled to find experts who weren't focused on "legal compliance."

We know that almost all Title IX cases end in institutional betrayal for the survivors who sought help. But how do administrators rationalize the work of retraumatization?

I answer that question in a new paper out today in the Journal of Higher Education. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… When I entered the field, I heard the same refrain over and over again:

"The administrators who work on these cases have the best of intentions, but they are impossibly constrained by the structures they work in and a hostile political climate."

When powerful men are accused of violence against women, we hear:

“Impossible! They never would have gotten their positions if that were true!”

And I ask you—did anyone inquire into *your* violence history before you got your current job? (And background checks don’t count.) I have been on hiring committees where a candidate’s history of bad behavior came to light—and the person who brought it up was removed from the committee for a “conflict of interest.”

The data is piling up. Even after all the public attention on Title IX and the sexual violence crisis on college campuses, your school is still much more likely to expel a student for cheating on a test than for committing a sexual assault.

usatoday.com/in-depth/graph… “Schools suspended just 1 of every 12,400 students enrolled each year for sexual misconduct. They expelled 1 in 22,900.”

This year feels like a crash course in women’s use of violence in relationships with men.

And the fact that I wish everyone knew was that women who act violently are most likely to engage in “situational abuse.” A short thread. I put “situational abuse” in quotes because there are a lot of things that end up in that umbrella—including some stuff that shouldn’t count as abuse at all.

For example, (some) researchers have a habit of including self-defense from a violent partner in their use of the term.

I can tell academics are prepping their syllabi for the fall because my article on survivor-centered strategies for teaching about sexual violence is making the rounds again.

After a year of sharing this work, I have more thoughts! A thread.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… After presenting this article in a bunch of different contexts, two themes come up over and over again:

1. You say to offer accommodations to survivors--what do you mean by that?

2. I'm a mandatory reporter. I can't do half of this stuff. So... now what?

I know everything is already overwhelming enough and we don't want to hear it right now...

But the proposed Title IX regulation that dropped yesterday creates a vehicle for faculty, staff, and other students to report student and employee pregnancies to the Title IX Office. *All* pregnancies. Not just instances of pregnancy discrimination.

The goal is to connect pregnant people to resources, such as the right for accommodations to their education. However, these types of reporting and documentation policies can have damaging effects too.

As I’m combing through the proposed Title IX regulation, I’m struck by how easy it is for a school to exploit rules that, on their face, look pretty reasonable.

Let me give you an example. The proposed reg has a specific provision that allows schools to remove respondents who pose a risk to the campus community—even if their Title IX investigation is still ongoing.

This is a crucial protection.

Explicitly extending Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students is a big win.

BUT we need to consider how the proposed mandatory reporting policy could harm LGBTQ+ communities. There are provisions about how *student social media posts* about discrimination could be subject to mandatory reporting.

In this moment of hyper-surveillance and violence against transgender students, this is chilling.

One of the reasons we extend so much empathy to perpetrators (and so little to victims) is because we don't have a great cultural script about how to respond when someone says:

"I did what I was accused of. I must be a monster."

After a lot of thinking, I have one. Our knee jerk reaction is to console someone who is self-deprecating in that way. We say things like:

"You're a good person. You didn't mean to. It's all going to be okay."

"I can't believe this is happening to you. Don't blame yourself! You didn't do anything wrong!"

I’m just going to come out and say it:

The reason you didn’t see mainstream media outlets assessing the evidence in Depp v. Heard is because they were afraid Johnny Depp would sue them next if they concluded he had been abusive. As someone who did a lot of press for this case, let me be clear:

This is not an assumption.