On Thursday November 14, federal complaints were filed against both Vanderbilt and Amherst — two schools that have had highly-publicized, ghastly rape cases in the past year — alleging that the college administrations both mishandled reports of sexual assault and permitted a hostile sexual environment to flourish on campus. This comes on the heels of a Title IX complaint filed against UConn by seven students and former students earlier this month. Finally, thankfully, deeply necessarily, colleges are being held accountable for their willful ignorance and neglect of a campus sexual assault problem that's reached epidemic proportions. But what has galvanized and empowered so many students to take such seemingly daunting legal action?

The Vanderbilt, Amherst and UConn filings are connected to one another. They're also connected to several other high-profile sexual assault cases that occurred this year — by way of the IX Network, a coalition of nearly 800 sexual assault survivors, advocates and allies working to combat campus rape culture. Annie Clark, one of the network's founders, bills its mission as "working to support all survivors, to change how colleges and universities handle sexual assault, and to change a culture where violence is normalized." Earlier this year, Annie and fellow IX Network advocate Andrea Pino began their sexual assault advocacy by filing a complaint against UNC along with three other women; in preparation, the pair listened to Supreme Court cases on their iPhones and read thousands of pages of legal documents.

Since then, the informal network they formed in order to give advice and assistance to other sexual assault survivors has grown exponentially. In an interview with News Observer, Clark explained their agenda thusly: "The goal is just to present a united front against not only sexual assault, but also the way universities across the country are handling and/or not handling it [and] how they're covering it up when it does happen... we're not going to put up with it anymore." In the course of a year, the IX Network has assisted with the Title IX and Clery Act complaints at UNC, Occidental, Swarthmore, UC Boulder, Dartmouth, USC, Berkeley, Emerson and UConn; Amherst and Vanderbilt were the 10th and 11th consecutive complaints to be filed with the coalition's help.

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Members of the network have also launched an educational campaign, Know Your IX, meant to provide students with the information necessary to "advocate for themselves when reporting violence, demand that their schools live up to their legal responsibilities, and push for campus-wide change if students' rights are not respected." In an email, Annie told me:

The wave of federal complaints in 2013 has been intentionally connected, and has been primarily student driven. We aren't talking about expensive lawyers who have filed these complaints; we're talking about a collective of young people who have connected because of a common, albeit terrible, experience. We learned the law by educating ourselves, then shared that information through social media, long phone calls, and late night Skype conversations. Our goal isn't just to file complaints, but to genuinely call attention to the fact that rape happens and that many times institutions of higher education aren't following their legal obligations to prevent it, and/or they are not treating survivors equally when they come forward. I want our schools to go beyond superficial compliance on paper and the notion of security theatre; I want change. 2014 in many ways will be a tipping point, and I'm hoping schools will proactively change.

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Of the two women filing a complaint against Amherst, one is anonymous. The other is Angie Epifano, whose devastating, horrifying, remarkably brave essay about her experience dealing with a completely callous and inept administration following her rape went viral last year. Angie was denied her request to move dorms after her assault. When she went to a campus sexual assault counselor, she was asked if she was certain she'd been raped and not just had a "bad hookup" and then urged to "forgive and forget." Her rapist walked freely around campus, making her feel terrified, unsafe, and depressed; when she made a suicidal comment (about how she was depressed that no one would listen to or consider her concerns!) to a campus counselor, she was sent to a psychiatric ward. Upon her release, she learned that the administration didn't want to let her return to campus.

In the aftermath of Epifano's essay, Amherst President Biddy Martin released a statement:

"Clearly, the administration's responses to reports have left survivors feeling that they were badly served. That must change, and change immediately. I am investigating the handling of the incident that was recounted in [Angie Epifano's essay about her sexual assault in the school newspaper] The Student. There will be consequences for any problems we identify, either with procedures or personnel."

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Two weeks later, the Amherst administration canceled classes to facilitate a Day of Dialogue about sexual violence on campus and how to handle it. In a statement to the Huffington