New Book :: On the Wrong Side

On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence by Nicole Bedera
University of California Press, October 2024

The debate over campus sexual violence is more heated than ever, but hardly anyone knows what actually happens inside Title IX offices. On the Wrong Side by sociologist Nicole Bedera provides the first comprehensive account of the inner workings of the secretive Title IX system. Drawing on a yearlong study of survivors, perpetrators, and the administrators who oversaw their cases, Bedera exposes the structures that predictably punish survivors who come forward in the service of protecting—or even rewarding—their perpetrators. In doing so, she reveals that the system tasked with ending gender inequality on campus only intensifies it, upending survivors’ lives and threatening the degrees that brought them to college in the first place.

Dr. Nicole Bedera is a sociologist and cofounder of the antiviolence consulting practice Beyond Compliance. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and has spent more than a decade studying sexual violence and advocating for survivors in media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, and Harper’s BAZAAR.

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