The System That Protects Predators

By Andy — 2026-10-23 — Literary News

Universities know how to defend themselves. They just don't know how to defend their students.

That's the uncomfortable centre of sociologist Nicole Bedera's new book, On the Wrong Side, which spent a year embedded in one university's Title IX office watching, more or less, what happens when a student reports sexual violence. The answer is: almost nothing useful.

The book emerged from genuine fieldwork—Bedera interviewed survivors, perpetrators, and administrators at what she calls Western University, then cross-referenced their accounts against hundreds of administrative documents. The findings read like an autopsy report: almost no student who experienced sexual harassment or assault received institutional support. Every structural decision, it turned out, benefited the accused.

But here's what catches you about this work. It's not rogue or accidental.

The infrastructure wasn't built to fail survivors by carelessness. It was engineered to fail them by design. Actually, that's not quite right—it wasn't consciously engineered. It just evolved that way, with each layer of bureaucracy, each memo, each carefully worded policy all pulling in the same direction: away from the perpetrator's exposure and toward the institution's protection.

Title IX itself arrived in 1972 as part of the Civil Rights Act, a single sentence forbidding sex discrimination in education. Then, eight years later, a case called Alexander v. Yale established that sexual violence counted as discrimination. Which made it a Title IX problem. Which meant universities got to handle it themselves.

The thing about giving institutions power over their own scandals is that institutions, being organizations, behave like organizations do. They protect themselves first.

Bedera watched survivors come in ready to report and leave, months later, having been subtly steered toward "informal resolution"—which means no investigation, no record, just an agreement not to talk about it. She watched administrators respond to institutional failure (at her field site, a woman was murdered on campus in the year she was there) not by reforming their process but by blaming the victim for not "using it better." She heard the reasoning: people just don't understand how difficult Title IX work is. People misunderstand their good intentions.

The Cornell case that's been making noise—where seven men were accused of gang rape, none were criminally charged, and the university issued no significant punishment—isn't exceptional by institutional standards. It's typical. Most cases never make it through the process because most survivors quit before the finish. The Cornell student was unusual only in that she endured it to the end.

When news breaks and administrators get asked why this happened, they'll say their process works fine. They'll suggest the survivor could have reported better, done it differently. Bedera calls this out: that's not reflection. That's defensiveness dressed as process improvement.

What's interesting, in a grim way, is that Bedera isn't asking universities to suddenly care more. She's asking something simpler and harder: stop letting them investigate themselves. Move Title IX out of university hands. Make it a state agency. Remove the conflict of interest entirely.

Because the conflict isn't subtle. Universities have endowments to protect, reputations to manage, wealthy donors and athletic programs and ranking considerations. A survivor in the system represents a risk to all of that. The accused, if he's wealthy or connected or a good student—which, as far as I can tell, is often the case—represents a future alumnus, a legacy, a fundraiser.

The book itself has this quality of being simultaneously enraging and, oddly, not entirely bleak. Bedera documents the failures with the clarity of someone who knows what better looks like. And she leaves space for the possibility that we could choose it.

But we'd have to actually choose it. Right now, universities are betting we won't.

Source: "By gaining unprecedented access to the inner workings of a Title IX office, Bedera not only exposes the system's failures but urges readers to consider how institutions can and must do better in supporting survivors." — Inside Higher Ed