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In this op-ed, Fatima Goss Graves, CEO and President of the National Women's Law Center, calls on the Biden administration to finalize new Title IX rules immediately.
In 2020, the Trump administration issued new rules on sexual assault in schools and colleges that, in part, encouraged administrators to dismiss certain complaints — reinforcing the lie that women exaggerate or make up assaults. During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden vowed to rewrite those rules, which were issued under the federal civil rights law Title IX. But, it took until June 2022 for the Biden administration to propose new Title IX rules. The Department of Education projected a May release date for the final rules, which it then pushed to this October.
Now, meeting even that deadline seems unlikely, as the Department has not yet sent Biden’s rules to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (which can take up to 120 days to conduct their mandatory review).
These delays mean starting yet another school year with a weakened Title IX. This summer, the National Women’s Law Center spoke with college students to understand the impact of these continued delays on survivors. I can say wholeheartedly that these past three years have been nothing short of devastating.
As a 15-year-old, “sexual assault wasn’t even in the realm of stuff” that Bella knew about, until a friend disclosed her assault to Bella. That woke Bella up. She dove into research, reading books like The Hunting Ground and even forming an anti-sexual violence club at her high school. When she started college last year, Bella felt informed.
By December, however, she was horrified by the number of people who had confided in her about assaults — one of which happened inside her dorm. Bella knew that, statistically, more than one in five women are sexually assaulted during college. But those women were now coming apart at the seams on her bedroom floor.
It suddenly felt like “sexual violence was everywhere.” Bella quickly moved to being both a confidante and a guide. Most students she encountered didn’t know what Title IX was, so Bella would explain the reporting process — and more importantly, its dangers.
The stories Bella heard echoed those in a recent Know Your IX survey of more than 100 student survivors. From September 2020 to January 2021, students shared how Title IX coordinators ghosted them, “accidentally” forgot to include evidence in their reports, and even refused to move a hearing date to accommodate a survivor’s witness (because “they had already ordered the catering”). It is no wonder, then, that one survivor’s PTSD nightmares aren’t only about re-experiencing their assault, but reliving how the Title IX office harmed them.
When we asked Emma Levine from the Title IX advocacy organization Know Your IX if students felt safe going to the Title IX office to report an assault, their answer was absolute: “No, definitely not.”
This is why Bella and other student activists have been doing everything they can to support survivors without the help of their schools.
They listen to stories of trauma; they warn one another about abusers on Instagram; in mass walkouts, they force administrators to hold abusers accountable. And they do all of this without a second thought. They treat every survivor as if they were running to the side of their best friend.
“Although it’s hard to hear their stories, that’s the reason I keep going,” Bella says. She perseveres not despite pain, but alongside it. When it comes to resilience, we all could take a page from these students' playbook.
But the truth is, resilience is not a policy. And there’s only so much that students can do within a broken system. Colleges will likely point to the fact that they, like student activists, are limited by the Trump Title IX rules. That only the Department of Education has the power to change them. That’s true, but schools can begin to proactively shift their policies beyond the bare minimum of Title IX. And, we join many colleges, universities, and those in the school community in calling on the Biden administration to finalize the Title IX rules immediately. With every delay, Title IX's promise of ending sex discrimination in school is further diminished, and survivors are further endangered — being harassed, forced out of school, and even pushed to the brink of suicide.
In May 2020, President Biden said that Donald Trump’s rule “guarantees that college campuses will be less safe for our nation’s young people.”
We agree. And that’s why student survivors cannot afford another delay.
