Settling for Less: How Organizations Shape Survivors' Legal Ideologies Around College Sexual Assault

Abstract

It is well-established fact that sexual assault survivors who report the violence they endured to their universities are traumatized by the process, but there is little research on how these institutional betrayals are enacted or how they impact survivors’ legal and gender ideologies more broadly. This dissertation draws on twelve months of ethnographic observation of one university’s Title IX-affiliated offices and 76 interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and the administrators who oversaw their cases. I use these data to explore the organizational mechanisms of institutional betrayal and how survivors came to view betrayals as rational, inevitable, and, ultimately, their fault. The second chapter of my dissertation explores why there are so few Title IX investigations, even when survivors originally intended to report. Identified in my fieldwork as one of the most common institutional betrayals, I describe the power universities hold by creating and administering their own Title IX procedures, which makes survivors dependent on the organization to navigate Title IX proceedings. Accordingly, university administrators can subtly and overtly discourage survivors from engaging in Title IX processes that pose risk to the institution. Survivors quickly lose control over the trajectory of their cases, but lack the institutional knowledge to understand how their case took a different form from their original intentions or resist administrators’ efforts to neutralize their complaints. The third chapter of my dissertation examines how these power disparities lead survivors to blame themselves for the betrayals in their cases. Instead of holding their university accountable for denying their Title IX rights, survivors blame themselves for failing to overcome barriers to reporting, struggling to understand convoluted university policies and procedures, or for expecting too much of a process known to habitually fail survivors. As a result, survivors experience an institutional distortion of their legal rights that leads them to believe they have fewer options for recourse than the law guarantees them. This distortion creates new barriers in holding their university accountable for institutional betrayal or engaging in activist efforts. The fourth chapter of my dissertation investigates how Title IX administrators justify their roles in institutional betrayal. Specifically, I identify gendered rationalization frames of himpathy and hysteria that allow university administrators to reinterpret their primary goal as the protection of young men’s futures and consider inaction as the ideal outcome for a Title IX case. To defend this view from critique, they cast the Title IX process as irrelevant for survivors by claiming they were either mistaken in labeling an experience as violent or suffering from a trauma too severe for a Title IX process to repair. This chapter demonstrates that institutional betrayal in sexual assault cases is a gendered process, exposing (particularly women) survivors to more discrimination from the very office tasked with combatting gender inequality in education. Taken together, this dissertation provides evidence that universities’ management of sexual violence reinforces gender inequality. The ideological shifts survivors (and others involved in Title IX processes) experience during institutional betrayal likely extend beyond university campuses, contributing to the way sexual violence and the betrayal of survivors is normal and acceptable in broader society.