How the good intentions of Title IX ended up punishing the innocent

How do we have difficult conversations? Especially in an age of polarisation, where everything is immediately politicised? But also where calls for ‘nuance’ and ‘complication’ are sometimes used to justify what is really just bigotry. Is it possible to be both protective of the vulnerable and to allow for a larger pursuit of justice and compassion? These are the questions I was left with after listening to the podcast series The Inbox (part of the larger anthology The 11th), a tricky but sensitive look at the questions that surround the adjudication of sexual violence accusations on college campuses through the Title IX system.

Sarah Viren wrote an essay for the New York Times about the accusations of sexual harassment against her wife that went viral. Her wife Marta worked as an assistant professor at Arizona State University, and one day she was informed she had been accused by her student of sexual harassment. The story that spirals from there — a bureaucratic nightmare of being dragged before a tribunal, a marriage that is strained by disbelief and mistrust — was riveting and felt singular. Sarah and Marta felt as though they must be the only ones to experience such a baffling and bizarre process of trying to prove innocence when it was difficult to ascertain the motivation behind the accusations and the frailties and inadequacies of the Title IX system. But no, there were others.

Through The Inbox, Sarah Viren talks to some of the people, mostly professors, who wrote to her after her essay was published, saying they had experienced similar false accusations and had struggled to retain their jobs and their sanity. And through these stories, you get the more complex perspective on a system that was started with good intentions, as a method of protecting women on campus from sexual violation, but whose flaws are so major it often ends up punishing the innocent or being used as a weapon of retaliation.