UMN Sociology Workshop Series: Setting the Record Straight on Campus Sexual Violence

Speaker Bio:

Nicole Bedera, Ph.D. is a sociologist and author of the book On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence. Her research broadly focuses on how our social structures contribute to survivors’ trauma and make sexual violence more likely to occur in the future. Her scholarship has influenced sexual violence prevention programming across the country, including for Planned Parenthood, and her work has been featured in many popular outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, and Teen Vogue. Nicole puts her work into practice as an affiliated educator at the Center for Institutional Courage and as a co-founder of Beyond Compliance Consulting.

Abstract:

The debate over how institutions should manage sexual violence is more heated than ever, but hardly anyone knows how organizations actually decide what to do after a sexual assault is reported. In On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence, Nicole Bedera observed and interviewed survivors, perpetrators, and administrators at an American university to get a look inside the cases that are usually shielded from public view. Her research exposes the structures that predictably punish survivors who come forward in service of protecting—or even rewarding—their perpetrators. In doing so, she reveals that the "neutral" systems tasked with ending gender inequality only intensify it, upending survivors’ lives and threatening the degrees that brought them to college in the first place.