I keep seeing these think pieces suggesting that informal resolution is going to be some great thing for campus sexual assault survivors. Let me explain why this is wrong.

From the outset, let’s be perfectly clear: informal resolution is NOT restorative justice.

Informal resolution is the federal government giving universities near-complete discretion over what to do when a survivor makes a report of sexual assault.

With one exception—the perpetrator has to agree to it.

According to the new Title IX regulation, there are only two rules about informal resolution: it can’t be punitive and it must be voluntary.

Let’s start with the voluntary part. This means that respondents—people accused of sexual assault—get to choose how and IF they want to participate in informal resolution.

That means if they don’t want to be held accountable, they can just say no.

As for the punitive part, this means schools can’t take any action that might be considered a punishment. That includes suspension and expulsion, but possibly also stuff like asking a rapist to avoid the library at certain times so a survivor can study in peace.

As part of my dissertation, I studied how one school enacted informal resolution. (Because it isn’t new.) The most common outcome? A training on the university sexual misconduct policy for either the respondent or colleagues/peers of the survivor.

These trainings were not rigorous. For respondents, they rarely amounted to anything more than someone reading the sexual misconduct policy aloud and asking if the respondent had any questions about it.

There was no doubt that these “trainings” were ineffective. Staff told stories of doing the same intervention with many of the same perpetrators repeatedly as complaints streamed in one by one.

And it should come as no surprise that most survivors were not satisfied with the outcome of their informal resolutions. In my study, only one survivor was pleased.

Could schools do something to meaningfully attempt to end sexual violence through informal resolution? Sure. There are no rules against it. But they probably won’t. The best interventions take weeks, not hours.

And schools notoriously underfund the organizations tasked with addressing sexual violence.

And schools have a vested interest in letting money-making perpetrators (star football players, children of big donors) get away with rape.

And schools are holding perpetrators accountable as a liability. They keep suing schools. Since they have more legal tools to do so than survivors, they’re the ones schools are most afraid of.

There’s a reason the Obama administration outlawed mediation. There are unequal power dynamics between victims and perpetrators that make it really hard for them to negotiate a response to violence. It can be done, but schools aren’t equipped to do it.

But that’s nothing compared to the threat of universities’ conflicting interests getting in the way. When we give universities control over how they handle Title IX, they protect themselves, not students.

And the best protection against an angry perpetrator is doing (almost) nothing at all.

And one more thing—informal resolution is especially brutal in the new Title IX rule because it’s basically the only viable option.

With the new cross-examination requirement, the formal adjudication process poses a great risk of retraumatization—and so a lot of survivors will avoid it to protect themselves.

That leaves nothing but informal resolution. And that, too, should be cause for serious concern.