In-Credible Risks: How Title IX Trainers Use Gendered Credibility Frames to Promote Protective Policies

• In Event: Sociology of Law Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Sociology of Law Section Roundtables: Table 3 — Gender, Sexuality, and Legal Categories

Abstract

This study analyzes how gendered credibility frames intersect with and facilitate the risk-framing and managerialization of Title IX law by third-party, professional trainers. I draw on, connect, and extend literature on risk-framing within the endogenous interpretation of law and literature on how front-line actors navigate credibility as they enact law and policy. I draw on these literatures to analyze how narratives about students’ credibility emerge as professional trainers construct compliance with Title IX law. Through observation of training sessions offered by a Title IX consulting company, I find that Title IX trainers frame the legal environment as risky and extoll managerial practices. Within this framing, however, trainers further rely on and reproduce conceptions of women as inaccurate interpreters of sexual violence. In arguing that women’s unreliability manifests in institutional liability, trainers emphasize their risk and rationalize practices that promote officer discretion, defensibility, and restrictive practices. As credibility and risk frames intersect in professional training, female students become what I refer to as “in-credible risks,” whose access to Title IX officers are taught to manage, rather than safeguard. Beyond the Title IX context, this study illuminates how cultural frames about the people and social problems that law concerns —the objects of legal regulation—emerge during the construction of legal compliance within the law-in-between.

Author

• Isabel Patten, University of California-Irvine