Nicole Bedera, Ph.D. is a feminist sociologist whose work focuses on how our social structures, organizations, and culture create a world where sexual violence is predictable and ordinary. By identifying how violence is produced, her work identifies interventions to make our society safer. Over the past decade, Dr. Bedera has studied sexual violence in a variety of contexts, including college campuses and the LGBTQ community. Her work has been published in leading academic journals and featured across public media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, Slate, and Teen Vogue. She is also an Affiliated Educator at the Center for Institutional Courage and a co-founder of Beyond Compliance Consulting. On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence is her first book. In her words: On the Wrong Side is a story of how Title IX is creating lifelong gender disparities—even though it is the very law tasked with fostering gender equality. I wrote this book to validate the experiences of survivors and help them cut through the institutional gaslighting that has made sexual violence even more damaging. I also hope it will help activists push for radical changes to the Title IX system. The book is still upsetting—enraging, mostly—but it’s also hopeful. I offer many different examples of concrete shifts that would make a huge difference for survivors. On the Wrong Sides does not treat campus sexual violence as inevitable, and I believe we could eradicate it within my lifetime.
