Kate Braddom is a staff writer and a first-year MPP student.

What is Title IX?

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 states that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” But what does Title IX actually require colleges and universities to do?

Since the ‘90s, several laws and rulings have expanded on Title IX, outlining exactly what obligations schools have regarding sexual assault. In 1990, Congress passed the Clery Act which aimed to increase transparency around campus sexual assault policies and statistics. The act required that schools report data on campus crimes and create and disseminate a policy prohibiting sex discrimination and establishing procedures to prevent and address incidents of sexual misconduct. In 1999, the Supreme Court formally defined sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination that limits a person’s full participation in education, codifying the idea that universities are obligated to take steps to prevent and address sexual assault on campus. To ensure that schools fulfilled this obligation, the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act (2013), included in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), amended the Clery Act to create more detailed requirements around prevention and education programs, require schools to provide certain services and accommodations to victims and set specific standards for disciplinary proceedings.

Title IX requires that schools protect students from sexual violence but has very few specific requirements when it comes to actually preventing sexual misconduct. The only substantive requirement regarding prevention is the administration of “education programs to promote the awareness of rape … [and] sexual assault” to all incoming students. Programming must include definitions of sexual assault and consent, information about bystander intervention and information about risk reduction and avoiding potential attacks. Beyond these guidelines, schools have a great deal of discretion regarding preventative measures.

Prevention

An ethnographic study of campus sexual assault at Columbia University, in seeking to conceptualize how students understand sexual assault and the conditions that lead to sexual violence, concluded that current efforts to prevent and address sexual assault on campus often fall short, failing to consider the complexity of student experiences and desires. Currently, most universities’ prevention efforts consist mainly of affirmative consent policies and intensive one-off trainings administered as part of orientation programming, both of which have proven to be insufficient. Many schools teach students about affirmative consent and sexual misconduct through intensive stand-alone seminars during freshman orientation and online pre-orientation courses. One-time trainings produce some modest positive results, but they are severely lacking as prevention tools and, as a 2022 study found, actually decrease the likelihood that female students will report an assault. Students often do gain a better understanding of what constitutes sexual assault and become less adherent to beliefs that are most conducive to assault, but this kind of knowledge is not typically linked with actual changes in behavior.

Trainings that have produced lasting behavioral changes are delivered in multiple sessions and require more active participation than one-time seminars or online modules. For instance, a bystander intervention training series known as Bringing in the Bystander, which had very positive results, is administered in up to three sessions and actively engages students through role-playing and empathy-building exercises. Other programs implemented in middle and high schools have also been effective at changing student behavior through multi-session curriculums addressing social norms and healthy relationships, as well as participatory elements like student plays, poster contests and “hotspot” mapping, in which students can identify places on campus where they feel unsafe. Importantly, effective approaches to reducing sexual misconduct require long-term and diffuse investments in creating cultural change, and the one-off trainings universities provide do not fit that bill.

Adjudication

Prevention is also only a small part of Title IX, which focuses heavily on the aftermath of assault, requiring that schools have protocols for investigating misconduct and conducting disciplinary proceedings. At most universities, these proceedings take the form of extremely adversarial adjudication processes that pit the complainant and accused against one another. Though Title IX guidance no longer explicitly prohibits the use of voluntary or informal mediation to resolve sexual assault complaints, guidance from the Office of Civil Rights still discourages these approaches, pushing schools toward punitive systems that emphasize individual culpability over addressing the cultures and environments that help produce assault. Formal adjudication typically results in sanctions like expulsion or transcript notations that do little to reform the behavior of perpetrators or prevent future incidents. Adversarial adjudication processes are often overwhelming and re-traumatizing for victims, especially as they are asked to recount and prove their claims, which leads many to feel doubted and unsupported. In addition, adjudication’s focus on punishment rarely aligns with what victims truly want: most victims are more interested in having their stories heard and believed and having offenders take responsibility for their conduct and change their behavior to prevent future harm, which does not necessarily translate to a desire for harsh punishments.

Recent research has suggested that there are more beneficial alternatives to adversarial adjudication processes, with many pointing to restorative justice as a promising pathway. Restorative justice practices emphasize supporting victims and repairing harms through methods like victim-offender dialogues and conferencing. Data on Restorative Justice practices is still forthcoming, but meta-analyses have generally found that restorative options for addressing sexual harm are more likely to reduce recidivism for both non-violent and violent offenses and have higher rates of victim satisfaction. Some colleges in California have begun offering students who have experienced sexual assault or harassment the option of participating in conferences with offenders. Conferences typically involve face-to-face meetings between the victim, offender, supporters and a trained facilitator in which offenders can describe their conduct;victims can describe the impact of harm and ask questions of the offender; and together the group develops a reparative plan that often includes measures like victim compensation and rehabilitative measures for the offender. At least one school noted that an increasing number of survivors were opting for restorative justice conferences and students’ responses among both victims and offenders have been very positive.

Where do we go from here?

While there is still relatively little data about emerging methods and practices, we know what doesn’t work and we have a strong sense for what is likely to be more effective. The question remains of how we can update Title IX to encourage schools to adopt more effective policies and move away from measures that do little to protect students. For starters, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on schools’ responsibility to prevent assault. Updating requirements for educational programming and disciplinary proceedings and re-evaluating the enforcement of Title IX could go a long way to improving campus cultures and reducing misconduct. Given the inefficacy of one-time trainings, one option is to require universities to provide annual or bi-annual trainings that include participatory elements. Requiring schools to provide alternatives to adjudication like mediation or conferencing that are more aligned with victims’ wishes is more likely to prevent future misconduct.

Finally, it is important to re-evaluate how Title IX is enforced. A survey of 440 universities found that only 11% of schools were fully compliant with the Campus SaVE Act and 30% were completely noncompliant or met less than four of 18 compliance criteria. Increasing compliance may mean implementing more severe sanctions for noncompliance. Providing recommendations for programming could also reduce some of the guesswork universities have to do to comply with complex regulations that leave many elements to their discretion. Offering financial incentives to schools that are fully compliant could also encourage investments in evidence-based programs and procedures.

Title IX in its current form has proven to be ineffective and unable to produce substantive changes in campus sexual assault rates, and something will need to change for universities to truly invest in improving conditions for students on campus.

This piece was edited by Deputy Editor Kathleen Bever and Executive Editor Nathan Varnell.

Photo courtesy of Maya Nair at the GW Hatchet.