One of the most alarming findings in my research is how affirmative consent has been weaponized against survivors.

Instead of expanding the list of actions that mean "no," I found that investigators only looked for actions that they could consider to mean "yes." In one example, a victim had specifically told her perpetrator at the beginning of the evening that she did not want to have sex.

And he confirmed to investigators that he had promised her that they wouldn't have sex.

Sexual assault perpetrated while the victim is asleep is much, much more common than most people think.

I have interviewed so many women who woke up to a boyfriend, family member, or trusted friend sexually assaulting them. @AngelBunny_9 (And that's exactly why perpetrators choose sleeping victims--there are so many ways to gaslight victims as a way to avoid accountability. Sleep is so vulnerable.)

Today, I'm combing through the sexual assault cases in my dissertation that involved alcohol.

I am stunned by how many of them took place in the victim's bedroom after she tried to throw a safe party at her own house. These women were intentionally trying to avoid the dangers of the party scene. They put a lot of thought into who they trusted to drink around them and who they invited into their home.

In our society, we have all been taught that rape and intimate partner violence are wrong, but most people can't really pinpoint why.

Here's a list of (some of) the impacts these acts of violence have on survivors across the life course. You might already know the psychological consequences of violence. Survivors are more likely to have anxiety, depression, PTSD, and difficulties with sex and sleep.

After spending years researching sexual violence in organizations, @DrJackieCruz and I are excited to announce we're going into business together!

At Beyond Compliance, we are ready to work with people who are committed to making change.

beyond-compliance-consulting.com Beyond Compliance came out of a problem that we ran into when we presented our research:

We met people eager to make their organizations safer, but lacking the expertise to make it happen on their own. And they struggled to find experts who weren't focused on "legal compliance."

We know that almost all Title IX cases end in institutional betrayal for the survivors who sought help. But how do administrators rationalize the work of retraumatization?

I answer that question in a new paper out today in the Journal of Higher Education. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… When I entered the field, I heard the same refrain over and over again:

"The administrators who work on these cases have the best of intentions, but they are impossibly constrained by the structures they work in and a hostile political climate."

When powerful men are accused of violence against women, we hear:

“Impossible! They never would have gotten their positions if that were true!”

And I ask you—did anyone inquire into *your* violence history before you got your current job? (And background checks don’t count.) I have been on hiring committees where a candidate’s history of bad behavior came to light—and the person who brought it up was removed from the committee for a “conflict of interest.”

The data is piling up. Even after all the public attention on Title IX and the sexual violence crisis on college campuses, your school is still much more likely to expel a student for cheating on a test than for committing a sexual assault.

usatoday.com/in-depth/graph… “Schools suspended just 1 of every 12,400 students enrolled each year for sexual misconduct. They expelled 1 in 22,900.”

This year feels like a crash course in women’s use of violence in relationships with men.

And the fact that I wish everyone knew was that women who act violently are most likely to engage in “situational abuse.” A short thread. I put “situational abuse” in quotes because there are a lot of things that end up in that umbrella—including some stuff that shouldn’t count as abuse at all.

For example, (some) researchers have a habit of including self-defense from a violent partner in their use of the term.

I can tell academics are prepping their syllabi for the fall because my article on survivor-centered strategies for teaching about sexual violence is making the rounds again.

After a year of sharing this work, I have more thoughts! A thread.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… After presenting this article in a bunch of different contexts, two themes come up over and over again:

1. You say to offer accommodations to survivors--what do you mean by that?

2. I'm a mandatory reporter. I can't do half of this stuff. So... now what?

I know everything is already overwhelming enough and we don't want to hear it right now...

But the proposed Title IX regulation that dropped yesterday creates a vehicle for faculty, staff, and other students to report student and employee pregnancies to the Title IX Office. *All* pregnancies. Not just instances of pregnancy discrimination.

The goal is to connect pregnant people to resources, such as the right for accommodations to their education. However, these types of reporting and documentation policies can have damaging effects too.

As I’m combing through the proposed Title IX regulation, I’m struck by how easy it is for a school to exploit rules that, on their face, look pretty reasonable.

Let me give you an example. The proposed reg has a specific provision that allows schools to remove respondents who pose a risk to the campus community—even if their Title IX investigation is still ongoing.

This is a crucial protection.

Explicitly extending Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students is a big win.

BUT we need to consider how the proposed mandatory reporting policy could harm LGBTQ+ communities. There are provisions about how *student social media posts* about discrimination could be subject to mandatory reporting.

In this moment of hyper-surveillance and violence against transgender students, this is chilling.

One of the reasons we extend so much empathy to perpetrators (and so little to victims) is because we don't have a great cultural script about how to respond when someone says:

"I did what I was accused of. I must be a monster."

After a lot of thinking, I have one. Our knee jerk reaction is to console someone who is self-deprecating in that way. We say things like:

"You're a good person. You didn't mean to. It's all going to be okay."

"I can't believe this is happening to you. Don't blame yourself! You didn't do anything wrong!"

I’m just going to come out and say it:

The reason you didn’t see mainstream media outlets assessing the evidence in Depp v. Heard is because they were afraid Johnny Depp would sue them next if they concluded he had been abusive. As someone who did a lot of press for this case, let me be clear:

This is not an assumption.

At this point, I've talked to a lot of people about the Depp case and there's one belief that nearly everyone seems to hold--regardless of whether they believed Depp's or Heard's version of events. And it exposes just how deep sexism runs in all of us. A thread. The belief is an expectation that Depp filed the defamation suit to clear his name and rebuild his reputation.

The Depp case has raised a lot of questions about men's claims of abuse. How can we tell when they're real? Or when they're DARVO? As an expert, let me explain how professionals in our field tell the difference. First, a quick primer on DARVO for anyone unfamiliar with the term. DARVO is a concept developed by Dr. Jennifer Freyd to describe how (very real) perpetrators react when confronted with allegations of their violence.

The wild thing about Twitter is your trolls are often one degree of separation away. They find you through retweets by mutuals. And today, I got some hate mail from someone a lot of feminists apparently follow.

And now I’m curious. If you were the mutual, would you want to know? Alright, next question:

What if it’s someone who you might follow for leisure? Like, say, an actor or a writer whose work you use for an escape?

If you're following the Depp trial, you have probably seen a lot of women saying some version of, "I'm a survivor. And as a real survivor, I can tell you that you shouldn't believe Amber Heard." Why is this happening? A thread. First, it's worth noting that survivors are a heterogeneous group. Perpetrators do not pick victims based on their political beliefs and experiencing violence is not always a radicalizing event for women.

The Depp Discourse has been a good reminder that most people don't know anything about how to evaluate evidence in a gender-based violence trial. So here's a thread about how everything you learned from true crime is wrong. First, I want to start with the so-called "gold standard" in cases involving sexual violence: the rape kit.

A lot of people believe that a rape kit can "prove" whether or not a sexual assault occurred and that a survivor's unwillingness to get one is proof she is lying.

People love to argue that rape is so traumatizing that survivors’ lives are already ruined. And they insist that since “the damage is done,” we can force survivors into *more* trauma—whether it’s the dysfunctional CJS or carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term.

It’s monstrous.

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1519392295824629760

In reality, a lot of what makes sexual violence so traumatic is our social response to survivors. We treat them like they should endure every burden of victimization alone.

With the right support, survivors can heal and thrive. And it requires getting their autonomy back.