Bernice Sandler

Long story short about Title IX, there's a lot there.

Title IX was created and pushed through by lecturer Bernice Sandler, Congresswoman Edith Starrett-Green, Hawaii Democrat Patsy Mink, and Republican Senators Birch Bay of Indiana and Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Each had faced direct or indirect discrimination on the basis of sex in academia and government and other places, and they wanted to change the laws around this issue.

So Senator Birch Bay told Congress, quote, The desire of many schools not to waste a quote-unquote man's place on a woman stems from such stereotype notions.

So let's talk about those media habits, and let's talk about the history of this issue in media.

The genesis of media interest in the specific topic of campus rape gangs dates to the 1985 publication of a report called Campus Gang Rapes, Party Games, by Julie Earhart and Bernice Sandler.

It was part of an effort by an organization called the Project on the Status and Education of Women, and the cases described all feature alarmingly similar contours.

Here's one of the four stories that begins the paper.

This occurred at a small Eastern liberal arts college.

Now, these crimes, campus MPRs, were certainly known to researchers prior to 1985, and terms like gangbang and pulling a train had been the subject of lore on campuses basically since women arrived there.

But the Earhart and Sandler write-up marked a turning point.

Before that, I can find no indication that this particular narrative frame occupied any significant real estate in the public imagination.