Violence against women: Title IX
Anyone writing about gender-based violence eventually runs into Title IX. It’s the law people name when a campus mishandles an assault report, the law invoked in fights over women’s sports, and the law most often confused with everything around it.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 states:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Any school receiving federal money needs to comply with Title IX. The hook is federal funding, not public status. Title IX covers sex discrimination in admissions, athletics, financial aid, employment, and sexual harassment and sexual violence.
Title IX is not a criminal law; it governs institutions, not individuals, and produces institutional consequences, not convictions. And it is not the same as the Clery Act or VAWA’s campus provisions, which impose their own separate obligations on schools. Those distinctions matter enormously in practice, and I’ll come back to them.
The operative rule right now is the 2020 Title IX regulation. It defines covered sexual harassment in three prongs:
an employee conditioning a benefit on sexual conduct
unwelcome conduct so “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it denies equal access
sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking — which are covered outright, with no severity test
Why the law exists
Before 1972, sex discrimination in education was legal and routine. Universities imposed quotas on women’s admissions or refused them entirely. Medical and law schools capped female enrollment. Women were dismissed from jobs for pregnancy. None of it violated any federal statute, because at that time, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covered race in education and sex in employment, but left sex in education untouched.
The push to close that gap came from Representative Edith Green of Oregon, who ran hearings on discrimination in higher education in 1970, aided by Bernice Sandler, whose own experience being passed over for faculty positions had turned her into an organizer. Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color in Congress, who had been rejected by a dozen medical schools because of her sex, authored an early draft. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana carried it in the Senate. It was signed on June 23, 1972. After Mink’s death, Congress renamed it in her honor.
Notably, sexual violence appears nowhere in that history. Title IX’s application to harassment and assault was built by litigation over the following decades:
Alexander v. Yale (1977–1980) advanced the argument, developed by Catharine MacKinnon and her co-counsel, that conditioning academic advancement on sexual submission is sex discrimination. The plaintiffs lost on the facts but established the principle.
Cannon v. University of Chicago (1979) held that individuals can sue under Title IX directly, not just wait for the government to act.
Franklin v. Gwinnett County (1992) made money damages available, which is when institutions began paying real attention.
Gebser (1998) and Davis (1999) then narrowed the exposure considerably, requiring that an appropriate official have actual knowledge and respond with deliberate indifference, and in peer harassment cases, that the conduct be “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.”
That last phrase was written as a standard for when a school owes money damages in a private lawsuit. The 2020 regulation imported it into the definition of what schools must respond to at all, which was a considerably different job than the one it was designed for.
By 2013, it was clear Title IX alone wasn’t producing consistent campus response. So Congress went around it. Section 304 of the VAWA reauthorization, the Campus SaVE Act, amended the Clery Act to require schools to publish statistics on dating violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking; give reporting parties a written statement of rights; make protective measures available on request; permit an advisor of choice; provide simultaneous written notice of outcome to both parties; and run prevention programming.
Those requirements took effect July 1, 2015 and have not changed since. That stability is the whole reason §304 matters, as the next section explains.
Challenges
1. The rules will not sit still.
Since 2011, the framework governing campus sexual misconduct has been issued as guidance, rescinded, replaced by regulation, replaced again, partially struck down, and vacated nationwide.
The 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter mandated a preponderance standard; OCR rescinded it in 2017. The 2020 rule narrowed harassment and required live hearings with cross-examination at colleges. A court struck one evidentiary piece of it in 2021. The 2024 rule broadened the definition and dropped the hearing mandate — until January 9, 2025, when a federal court in Kentucky vacated it nationwide in Tennessee v. Cardona, holding it exceeded the Department’s authority. The 2020 rule snapped back. New rulemaking is now pending.
The obvious cost is confusion. The deeper cost is that institutional competence never compounds: a school that spent years training investigators under one framework retrains under the next, and the rational response to that much instability is to do the minimum defensible thing. Students, meanwhile, learn that the process changes with the administration — which suppresses reporting more effectively than any single provision.
Note that this harms everyone involved. A student accused under a process the institution rebuilt last spring isn’t getting reliable procedure either.
2. The jurisdictional gap — and the protections most people don’t know survive it.
The 2020 rule requires schools to dismiss Title IX complaints falling outside the “education program or activity,” or occurring outside the United States. Study abroad, most off-campus housing, a great deal of ordinary student life: out of scope.
So when a school dismisses a complaint on Title IX jurisdictional grounds and routes it to student conduct instead, the advisor of choice, written notice of outcome, protective measures, and statement of rights still apply. They must be built into that alternate process. Many institutions don’t do it. The belief that VAWA was absorbed into Title IX is common enough that ATIXA, the field’s main professional association, published a reminder that §304 remains fully operative. The Department’s April 2021 program review letter to Arizona State is the clearest instance of it being enforced on its own terms.
3. Enforcement itself is in flux.
As of June 2026, the Department of Education has signed interagency agreements referring civil rights complaints, including Title IX, to the Justice Department for investigation and possible resolution. OCR keeps intake and nominal authority, but where a complaint actually goes has changed. This sits alongside a 2025 executive order directing the Department’s wind-down and substantial staffing cuts. A right that exists on paper still depends on somebody being there to enforce it.
4. The statute’s central term is now contested.
On June 30, 2026, in West Virginia v. B.P.J., decided with Little v. Hecox, the Supreme Court held that state restrictions on transgender athletes violate neither Title IX nor equal protection, with the majority stating that “sex” in Title IX cannot plausibly mean anything other than biological sex. The Department has a rule on the definition of sex pending.
This complicates the standard reform prescription. The usual argument is that Congress should codify Title IX protections so they stop moving with each administration, and there’s something to it, since §304’s procedural core has held for a decade precisely because it’s statutory. But Title IX’s own words haven’t changed since 1972. What changed in June was the Court’s account of what one of them means.
Which suggests the durable thing isn’t statutory status by itself — it’s statutory language that is procedurally concrete. “Provide simultaneous written notification of the outcome” has no contested meaning; there’s nothing in it to reinterpret. The provisions that get relitigated every few years are the ones turning on a word that can be argued about: what counts as sex, as harassment, as an equitable process.
Takeaway
Title IX is the most visible law in this area, the most litigated, and the least stable. If you’re advising a student today, the protections most likely to still be standing next year are the unglamorous procedural ones sitting in the Clery Act — the ones nobody puts on a poster.