Title IX Policies Mirror the Prison System and Harm Student Survivors

By M. Colleen McDaniel and Jennifer M. Gómez

Illustration by Megan Rizzo

This piece is a part of our Spark Series Imagining Abolition and Educational Safety Beyond Policing

“If men rape because they are men — as . . . theorists have argued — women will always be forced to regard the police, courts, and prisons as their only glimmer of hope. If . . . the incentives for rape are not a natural product of male anatomy or psychology, but are rather social in nature, the prospects of eradicating sexual violence will depend on changes of an entirely different order.” — Angela Davis, 1981, p. 39

White Carceral Feminism & Sexual Violence

Although pleas for public attention to reduce sexual violence have been prominent in mainstream discourse for decades, the 2010’s saw rising attention for addressing rape on college campuses. Campus activists wrote to the Department of Higher Education to file complaints under Title IX — federal legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sex at educational institutions that receive federal funding — about universities’ mishandling of sexual assault cases including cover ups, victim blaming, and insufficient offender intervention and punishment. Activists sought to fight popular misconceptions, such as the belief that rape and sexual violence is only perpetrated by back-alley strangers, when there is a higher likelihood from people known to the victim like friends, classmates, family members, and dating partners. However, out of these movements arose another misconception that most rapes are perpetrated by a small number of sociopathic repeat offenders who commit a high number of rapes on campus. This resulted in an anti-violence movement that centered around the punishment and removal of such offenders as the true path to safer campuses.

This misconception diverts blame from the broader social culture of misogyny and violence that contributes to most cases of rape and sexual violence by creating a skewed narrative that the cause of such violence is incurable personality traits in a few unsavable monsters. In alignment with White carceral feminism — a feminism which sees punitive measures including surveillance, policing, and incarceration of violence offenders as necessary tools for women’s liberation — the proposed solution for protecting women from sexual violence was to punish and remove these repeat offenders from campus. Unsurprisingly, carceral White feminism and mass incarceration, even in response to campus sexual violence, systemically harms Queer, Black, and Brown students who are most likely to be systemically punished and retraumatized when violence happens.

Campus Sexual Violence & Carceral Interpretations of Title IX

In the 2010’s, the US Department of Education under President Obama’s administration released Title IX guidance, known as the “Dear Colleague” letter. This sexual violence response guidance recommended reporting policies and investigation processes that mirror the criminal legal system. Specifically, Dear Colleague outlined: universal mandated reporting, investigation and hearing processes similar to courts, and punitive action for offenders.

Over a decade later, campus “best practices” under Title IX still use carceral approaches that systemically harm marginalized survivors by exacerbating codes of silence around sexual violence and harm, while leaving individuals and communities without healing. According to cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT), violence that happens within marginalized groups — known as cultural betrayal trauma — is often accompanied by racial loyalty and (intra)cultural pressure: the cultural mandate to not disclose abuse in order to protect the in-group. This in-group protection from White Supremacy in the Black community, for instance, guards against racial discrimination, such as stereotypes painting Black men as sexually violent and carceral systems desecrating communities. This cultural mandate of (intra)cultural pressure weighs heavily on Black female college student survivors (e.g., @rapedatspelman). As Tayler Mathews stated: “(Intra)cultural pressure explains the ambivalence I’ve had to negotiate about bringing negative attention to my HBCU. Despite the abominable (in)actions of my University, HBCUs remain precious institutions that must be protected and defended, but not at the expense of individuals who are facing real injustices at the hands of these schools.”

Given that institutions of higher education already engage in discriminatory practices against racially marginalized communities, universities that take carceral approaches to Title IX put marginalized survivors in a bind to either 1) engage in this carceral system to seek safety and some semblance of accountability; or 2) stay silent on campus to protect others and themselves from discriminatory treatment.

Abolition Approaches to Addressing Campus Sexual Violence

As told by Angela Davis (1981), we must address the social and cultural reasons why people perpetrate sexual violence. Change can include strategies from the Critical-Interdisciplinary Sexual Violence Research Summit, which brought together survivors, advocates, clinicians, and researchers to devise strategies for addressing campus sexual violence that centered marginalized people and interrogated systems of power and oppression. They suggested that prevention and intervention approaches must address the roles that systems of oppression, such as White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Capitalism play in putting marginalized people at higher risk for sexual violence by reinforcing inequities. For example, 1 in 2 trans people experience sexual violence at some point in their life because a Patriarchal society despises gender nonconformity and trans lives. As such, many believe that harm committed against trans people is acceptable and justified, resulting in high rates of sexual violence against trans people. Conversely, if a university has trans-inclusive policies, educates its community, and establishes social norms that trans lives are valuable and deserve respect, sexual violence may be prevented and reduced on their campus.

Summit recommendations included the need to seek solutions outside of university policy, as extant policies provide carceral approaches that center punitive action for offenders, when what is needed is to dismantle the systems that perpetuate the very existence of sexual violence.

With abolition being as much about building as it is about abolishing, prevention and intervention of campus sexual violence could look like:

• Abolish campus surveillance (e.g., emergency police polls and surveillance cameras); build community responsibility in violence prevention.
  - Increase evidence-based primary prevention programming for individuals and communities that focuses on building skills and improving ability to make decisions and take action to reduce violence, such as bystander intervention programming.
  - Promote existing anti-violence and equitable social norms and equity practices on campus (e.g., structural and interpersonal discrimination replaced with demonstrative respect and value for persons across genders, races, nationalities, religious expressions, sexual orientations, abilities, etc.)
  - *Although the authors could not find examples of universities with reduced surveillance, a recent poll from Kaplan and Inside Higher Ed showed that even though there have been increased campus surveillance as safety efforts, LGBTQIA+ students and Black and Brown students feel less safe on campus than other students.
• Abolish police intervention on campus; build community care practices.
  - Provide student-led escort services and 24-hour hotlines.
  - Hire unarmed, trauma-trained, mental health first responders.
  - Create strong ties with grassroots community organizations that provide survivor support services.
  - Host trauma-informed survivor and community support groups.
  - Invest in mutual aid and transitional funds for survivors.
  - Compensate all university employees well enough that they can be financially independent from sexual abusers.
  - *Although the authors could not find examples of universities with reduced policing, for example of the positive impact of reduced policing in school systems, see Chicago Public Schools.
• Abolish universal mandated reporting; build survivor-centered support response services.
  - Require university employees to report to Title IX or law enforcement only when a survivor requests.
  - Require university employees to share resources with survivors upon receipt of a disclosure.
  - Provide cultural humility and trauma training for all university employees.
  - Increase confidential resources on campus such as advocates, therapists, and religious leaders.
  - *For example, see University of Oregon
• Abolish Title IX hearings and investigative processes that mirror the legal system; build transformative justice practices that focus on repairing relationships and communities over revenge and punishment via self-reflection, apology, repair, and changed behavior.
  - Focus response processes on personal truth-telling rather than arguing over an objective truth.
  - Acknowledge the shared role communities play in perpetuating violence. Emphasize community healing and transformation.
  - *For example, see Occidental College.

The above recommendations can happen through institutional courage in which sexual violence are addressed through measurable institutional actions, including operating with transparency (e.g., policies and procedures known by all), cherishing the whistleblower (e.g., demonstrating gratefulness to those who identify problems related to Title IX and sexual violence and college campuses), and apologizing for wrongdoings (e.g., apologies from the university itself, via courageous institutional members, when they have mishandled and harmed survivors).

Concluding Thoughts

If we abolish carceral approaches to anti-discrimination polices like Title IX, and if anti-violence activists and workers apply this abolition framework to addressing campus sexual violence through trauma-informed, culturally competent practices and policies, then a new higher education is possible: there could be reductions in violence right alongside individual- and community-level healing and transformation. With our hope for such a transformed future, an uncomfortable reality remains: higher education, at its very core, was designed for wealthy, abled, White, and cisgender men.

Will abolishing current practices lead to transforming higher education into a violence-free place? Or is a new model of the educational system altogether needed?

Though we close this piece with these questions unanswered, we know that the status quo of carceral approaches in addressing sexual violence harms the most marginalized among us — including those who are victimized and those who perpetrate. Unlike White carceral feminism, true abolition must work to restore individuals and communities following acts of violence, understanding that an individual’s perpetration has been bred among all of us. As such, it harms all of us. As we dream for an equal and peaceful higher education and society, we know this transformation is a must. Abolition frameworks provide us with actionable steps towards a transformed landscape of higher education.

M. Colleen McDaniel, Ph.D. (she/they) is an award-winning anti-violence activist and interpersonal violence primary prevention expert based in the Northern Virginia/DC area. Dr. McDaniel has organized for graduate workers’ rights, anti-sexual harassment, and Title IX reform with the Graduate Organizing Committee, AFT #6123 in Detroit, MI and the Alliance for Survivor Choice in Reporting Policies.

Jennifer M. Gómez, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and incoming Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University, Board Member and Research Chair of the Center for Institutional Courage, and 2021–22 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. By focusing on societal inequality’s role on the impact of violence for Black American youth, young adults, and elders, Dr. Gómez uses her cultural betrayal trauma theory to both document harm and identify avenues of hope and healing for youth, families, communities, institutions, and society.