Title IX is the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at any institution receiving federal education funding. That's every public university, most private colleges, and K-12 schools across the country. It was passed in 1972.

Title IX does not allow anonymous reporting.

Formal complaint procedures require you to identify yourself. When universities employ your abuser, control your funding, oversee your degree progress, and hold your professional future, that means you are forced to choose between reporting misconduct, and naming yourself to an institution that has every tool and incentive to retaliate against you.

Most people do the math and stay silent.

The federal data makes the scale of that silence impossible to ignore. The most comprehensive campus-specific study available found that:

• 80% of student rape and sexual assault victimizations go unreported
• 1 in 5 of those who stayed silent cited fear of reprisal as the reason.

I am Julie Cruse, author of The Burn List: A Memoir of Abuse from Home to Higher Education and founder of Academic Abuse LLC. At AcademicAbuse.com, which tracks media-reported misconduct at more than 750 U.S. universities:

• sexual misconduct and Title IX violations = 21.9% of all documented cases
• harassment = 16.1% of all documented cases
• retaliation = 4.7% of all documented cases

And those are only the cases that made the news.

We are asking Congress and the U.S. Department of Education to amend Title IX regulations to require a legally protected anonymous complaint pathway at every federally funded institution. That would allow survivors and witnesses to seek justice without triggering mandatory processes that put them at risk.

Sign this petition. Share it with every student, employee, and alumnus who was ever told to think carefully about their career before saying another word.

— Julie Cruse | Author, The Burn List | Founder, Academic Abuse LLC | academicabuse.com

 
Sources:

BJS: Rape and Sexual Assault Among College-Age Females, 1995–2013
Dept. of Education: Campus Safety & Security Data — Search by Institution
NCES: Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2023