The Victors Write History: How Title IX Gives Perpetrators the Last Word
Trigger Warning: This article discusses sexual violence and harassment, including explicit depictions of sexual assault, which readers may find distressing.
Writing is a privilege, not a punishment. Prose, essays, and stories are vehicles for truth and influence–reflecting a means to bridge individuals and contribute our voice to the vast human experience. Despite the responsibility of academic institutions to uphold the legacy of the written word, Title IX allows American Universities to dole out disciplinary actions in the form of a three-page essay in exchange for a clean slate — demonstrating just how much American universities have lost the plot. The hollow disciplinary response from Cornell’s Title IX investigation into on-campus sexual assault is no outlier. My own case, which I submitted under the same law, ended similarly: a written assignment in place of accountability.
In 1972, the United States enshrined a landmark case into law which protects individuals from discrimination on the basis of sex in academic settings. Title IX represents the investigative body responsible for enforcing these protections. While the lofty aims outlined in 1972 may suggest that their role is to protect victims of sexual assault, Title IX operates by protecting the institution rather than the complainant. Even in the “lucky” circumstance where the reality of events fit the definition of rape unambiguously, the disciplinary sanction can be as measly as a 2-semester suspension and a 3-page essay.
Through these tepid sanctions, universities empower perpetrators to have the final word in instances of sexual assault. In the aim of mutual damage control, Title IX gives license to students who have caused material harm to rewrite history and frame their actions as a mistake, a phase, or a misunderstanding–thus closing a chapter of bad behaviour. It is in this framework where rapists become the victim of an inevitable developmental stage: “boys will be boys,” a mere steppingstone on their way to becoming a “promising young man.” But what justice is left for the involuntary ghostwriters of these stories that the perpetrators steal and maim?
In 2018, I was Jane Doe. I filed a report of sexual assault to the Title IX office. As a writer, I thought I had an advantage in penning my story in a compelling and coherent fashion. Not because it was a work of fiction, but because I naïvely thought this skill may lend me both the control necessary to be convincing, and the credibility of being a “good” victim. However, I still felt ridiculous. I was reporting my ex-boyfriend and had only begun to accept that I was assaulted; thus, I feared I presented as nothing more than a scorned lover picking at old wounds to punish a potentially promising young man.
Most of all, I assumed I had an advantage in that this young man wasn’t all that promising. He was failing classes and had recently been arrested for drug possession. Previously, he was accused of sexually assaulting a peer in high school, and I later learned that he had groped a woman in my sorority. The incident was reported to the sorority; however, no official report was submitted to the university, despite the Title IX reporting obligations of those who received the disclosure. Even within his own fraternity, he was known to be erratic and volatile. I made a complaint to his fraternity first, as he had demonstrated a pattern of leveraging Greek Life — the broader social connectome linking fraternities and sororities — to prey upon young women.
While the fraternity’s approach to justice was rudimentary at best, it was swifter and with greater regard to the victim than what Title IX was capable of. I arrived at the fraternity house and was unceremoniously ushered past a cardboard cutout of John Cena and plopped into one of the brother’s bedrooms. At the same time, the subject of my report was in the garage — locked up like a rabid animal—being interviewed by the council of fraternity brothers. When they finished, the brothers marched up the stairs and sat crisscross in a manner so reminiscent of story time that I began my story with, “Once upon a time.” I told them:
We drank that night with his friends, and he dutifully filled my cup with each sip I took. Despite knowing I did not smoke, he pressured me into smoking concentrated marijuana. The last thing I remember is sitting on the ground with my head resting on my knees, looking at the yellow cup of water placed beside me. I woke up disoriented and standing, dimly realising he was changing me into one of his sweatshirts — the letters of our university scrawled across my chest. I went back to sleep without uttering a word, still not truly conscious. In the morning, he asked if I remembered anything. I said no. He recounted the rape and how I had screamed, cried, and urinated the bed from fear. Allegedly, I would not let him near me afterward, hence why he had slept on the floor.
The brothers were quiet and respectful. Most looked away or bowed their heads throughout my account. They glanced amongst themselves, and the president spoke earnestly saying what happened was not okay and that he would be removed from their fraternity effective immediately. We shook hands and the brothers exited the room solemnly—if not apologetically. Graciously, one of the brothers brandished a steel baseball bat and escorted me to my vehicle as an added precaution given that the perpetrator had been released from his garage holding cell and remained at large. Despite this small victory, the road toward any semblance of justice remained long and daunting.
From the complaint submission to the appeal, my experience with Title IX took ten months. In the end, investigators chose not to include that the respondent had 1) broken the no contact order twice, 2) threatened individuals in my orbit during the investigation, 3) previously committed violent acts against me, and 4) previously sexually assaulted fellow students on campus. Worse than repeatedly having to recount traumatic details to investigators, the disciplinary hearing was an arena in which my rapist was given the opportunity to directly cross-examine me. While this was retraumatising, it served in my favour, as his questions revealed his warped understanding of consent (“well if she doesn’t remember, then why are we believing her?”). Despite extensive omission and harmful theatrics, the council determined unanimously that rape occurred on the night in question. Reading this finding in my report was the first time I could trust my own story. After months of doubt and fear, I found strange comfort in the official report confirming what I knew had happened. It was a sign that I was heard—better yet, it was a sign that I was believed.
I felt victorious in some sense that I had overcome the obstacle of disbelief in others and in myself–not yet digesting that just below the undisputed finding of rape lay an absurd contradiction. The consequences for his actions were to repeat an online sexual assault module (mandatory for all students), a 2-semester suspension, and a 3-page essay—the prompt for which is shown below.
Above all, I learned that in this system, even when they lose, they win. Though definitionally a rapist, Title IX gifted him the opportunity to envision himself “moving forward with his life” as a “responsible young man,” whereas I was left still seized by the past. I scrambled to send an appeal to the university president within the required deadline of three days following the decision — a deadline I would have never been informed of had I not sought it out. An excerpt from my appeal is below.
“If rape does not constitute expulsion, what magnitude of violence warrants this decision? For me to bear the unfair burden of carrying out this punishment through my continued attendance, I am pressured to choose to either remain in the place in which I was repeatedly assaulted, or knowingly put the academic community at risk in my absence by making room for an individual proven to be dangerous. Since the initial report, I have lost the equivalent two semesters my rapist faces as punishment in the form of waning friendships, grades, and my health. The difficult choice to speak up and seek help has left me utterly disturbed and disappointed that my sacrifices and my trauma amount to an offensively lenient resolution that I myself must oversee in order for it to reach its fullest extent.”
In the end, the president of the university granted my appeal and expelled the respondent. I transferred universities, and after the dust settled, I stopped writing altogether. I had exhausted all my ink and ire. The investigative process laid bare that, in this system, the purpose of a victim’s story is to be disproven. Only after every effort to dismantle our account has failed does Title IX begrudgingly acknowledge the truth in one hand, while dismissing the consequences with the other.
After six years, I have returned to the art of writing and have since recognised that a system that seeks to stifle our voices should not define our experience. In sharing our truth, we regain ownership of the powerful stories that were once wielded against us.
