About Us

Founded in 2013, Know Your IX is a survivor- and youth-led project of Advocates for Youth that aims to empower students to end sexual and gender-based violence in their schools. We envision a world in which all students can pursue their civil right to education free from violence and harassment. We recognize that gender violence is both a cause of inequity and a consequence of it, and we believe that women, transgender, and gender non-conforming students will not have equity in education or opportunity until the violence ends. We draw upon the civil rights law Title IX as an alternative to the criminal legal system – one that is more just and responsive to the educational, emotional, financial, and stigmatic harms of violence.

We support the choices survivors make – whether or not to report, and to whom to report – and recognize that these choices are particularly difficult because our laws, systems, and communities offer a severely limited set of options for survivors. Given the tremendous flaws and violence of the criminal justice system, we celebrate Title IX’s potential to create effective anti-carceral responses to serious harms – while recognizing that this promise has not yet been realized.

We accomplish our mission through:

• Educating college and high school students in the United States about their legal rights to safe educations free from gender-based harms;
• Training, organizing, and supporting student survivor activists in challenging their educational institutions to address violence and discrimination;
• Advocating for policy change at the school, state, and federal levels to ensure meaningful systemic action to end gender violence.

[Know Your IX is not associated with the Know Your Power® Program.]

Our Values

We affirm and actively support every survivor’s right to seek justice and healing for themselves in the way that they choose. The work we do is always centered in the needs and experiences of survivors themselves.

We recognize that sexual and gender-based violence are manifestations of systemic gender oppression, which cannot be separated from all other forms of oppression, including but not limited to imperialism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. The experiences of survivors are shaped by their individual identities and these connected systems of oppression. We also recognize that institutions play a central role in enabling these systems of violence and oppression.

We recognize that people of all identities – including but not limited to those based on race, gender, sexuality, and disability – can experience and be impacted by sexual and dating violence. We strive to challenge narrow and inaccurate representations of what assault, violence, and survivorship look like. We also acknowledge that these forms of violence disproportionately affect people of color, women, and transgender and gender non-conforming people. With this understanding, we work to ensure inclusive policies and accessible resources in schools and beyond.

We affirm direct action as a tactic to challenge the silencing of survivors and pressure power-holders to support survivors and carry the weight of gender violence. Direct action can help expose the violence normalized by our institutions and larger society.

We seek to foster transparency around issues of sexual and dating violence because we believe that a bottom-up approach to building power is the only way to achieve justice and hold our schools accountable.

We support school-based adjudication of sexual and dating violence cases as an anti-carceral alternative to the criminal legal system, which does not work to effectively support or protect many communities. We recognize the many reasons that survivors do not report to law enforcement, including but not limited to harmful or violent experiences with police, immigration status, fear of race-based discrimination, and distrust. We strenuously oppose efforts to make reporting to law enforcement the only option for student survivors of sexual and dating violence.

We recognize that public conversations around sexual and dating violence often focus on white, straight-presenting, and cisgender female survivors. With this understanding, we work to amplify the voices and support the work of groups often marginalized within these conversations – including survivors of color, LGBTQ+ survivors, and men who have experienced sexual violence.

We practice democratic decision-making and cultivate spaces that do not reinforce or replicate oppressive systems of power. We recognize that survivors and student activists on the ground are the experts on their own needs in schools. We center student and survivor leadership in setting the goals and strategies of our campaigns.

We believe that ending sexual and gender-based violence in K-12 schools and colleges is a pivotal part of making education accessible for all students – and part of the broader struggle for education justice.

We recognize that surveillance, incarceration, imperialism, and ideologies of normalcy are tools of state dominance. We recall the continuing histories of the state’s co-optation of progressive movements’ practices and goals. We aim to resist and reject the violence of the state in and through our work. We believe no one is disposable and also affirm the importance of holding individuals accountable for the harm they cause.

We seek to create local, regional, and national communities of activists who share these values and will work together to address sexual and gender-based violence in our schools.

Donate

In 2013, Know Your IX emerged as the leading voice in the movement to end gender based violence in schools. But our fight has only gotten harder thanks to countless attacks on survivors’ rights. By donating to Know Your IX you will help us mobilize students and survivors across the country to hold our schools and government accountable and create lasting change. Your donations hep us get resources to students, pass policies that support survivors at the local, state, and federal level, shine a spotlight on survivors through media, and create a future where the cost of education never includes gender-based violence.

Our Team

Know Your IX is a survivor- and youth-led project of Advocates for Youth that aims to empower students to end sexual and gender-based violence in their schools. Know Your IX program staff educate, train, organize, and support student survivors in their work to affect change in schools across the country. Know Your IX activists advocate at the federal, state, and local level for adherence to Title IX that includes protections for survivors of sexual assault. For more information, contact emma@advocatesforyouth.org.

Know Your IX’s activist team is made up of Communications Organizers and Policy and Grassroots Organizers. For more information and to apply to our next academic year program, click here.

Senior Manager

Emma Grasso Levine is the Senior Manager of Title IX Policy and Programs at Advocates for Youth. In this role, she manages Know Your IX, a survivor- and youth-led project that empowers students to end sexual violence in schools. She holds a degree in Dramatic Writing and Social & Cultural Analysis from NYU, where they focused their thesis on transformative justice and community-based solutions to gender violence. Previously, she has successfully organized to create school-based policy change, improve Title IX trainings and processes to be inclusive of LGBTQ+ students’ experiences, and provide free menstrual hygiene products to students. Emma has successfully trained thousands of students and advocates on how to organize to end gender violence and create survivor-centered policy change. As a national expert, Emma has provided her expertise on gender violence in schools to news outlets across the country, including The New York Times, NPR’s Morning Edition, The Washington Post, Politico, USA Today, The Hill, and Ms. Magazine.

 

Co-Founders

Dana Bolger is a Senior Staff Attorney at A Better Balance, where she uses direct representation, policy advocacy, and outreach and education to advance justice for workers. Dana joined A Better Balance in 2020 as an Equal Justice Works Fellow.  She graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Paez on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  Prior to law school, Dana co-founded and was executive director of Know Your IX, a national organization that empowers students to end gender violence and harassment in school.  Dana’s writing on gender justice has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Yale Law Journal, and UC Davis Law Review.

 

Alexandra Brodsky is a senior attorney at Public Justice. She specializes in cases challenging sex and race discrimination in schools, and also litigates suits concerning access to justice, workers’ rights, disability discrimination, and civil rights violations within the criminal legal system. Before joining Public Justice in 2019, Alexandra clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and worked to end discriminatory school push out at the National Women’s Law Center, where she was a Skadden Fellow. During and before law school, she served as founding co-director of Know Your IX, a youth-led organization combating gender violence in schools. For her work on sexual harassment, Alexandra received a Ms. Wonder Award from the Ms. Foundation and was named to POLITICO Magazine’s “50 Thinkers, Doers, and Visionaries” and Forward Magazine’s Forward 50. Alexandra is also the author of Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt 2021).