Tag: De-escalation

Why Bystander Intervention is Still Worth the Risk

Bystander intervention is always on our minds, and even more so after the horrific violence in Portland this past weekend.

While we don’t know all the details of this tragic incident, here’s what we do know:

Violence is a tool of social control. When people are made to fear being their authentic selves or be out in public (as a woman, as an “out” LGBTQ person, wearing a hijab), their lives become smaller. The impact they make on the world around them is diminished for fear of too much negative attention. The change that they can uniquely affect because of who they are is shuttered. The constant threat of violence naturally has that effect on those who are targeted for violence and hate crimes, which is the intention – conscious or not.

When people act as bystanders, or allies, they agree to share that risk. It hardly ever means shouldering the burden in place of the person affected, but hopefully means diminishing the impact for the target through an act of solidarity. Young people know this when talking about helping someone who is being bullied. Fear that the person will turn on them next is always in the forefront of their minds. As it should be.

Most opportunities for bystander intervention and acts of allyship expose us to less harm than what we witnessed in Portland this past weekend – but all do involve taking on some level of risk. And when we navigate our own levels of risk tolerance, what we’re really exploring is “How much am I willing to let this affect how I navigate the world? How much am I willing to consider worrying about speaking, worry about taking public transportation and having to choose between guilt and danger? How much am I willing to let this affect my life in order to help this person live more freely?”

If violence is a tool of social control, we must acknowledge that it wants us to stay silent, even as bystanders. It’s designed to divide us, to make us not ride public transportation, to avoid eye contact when someone is being harassed, to change the topic when someone makes a hurtful comment or “joke.” Liberation demands that we resist – that we find ways to persist and act in an unsafe world, to connect and speak up when someone is being hurt – whether they are present or not.

What Can I Do?

Practice for action: When watching these viral videos or TV shows featuring violence or hate crimes, imagine what you could do. If you practice creating plans instead of practicing being stuck in overwhelm, it can help prepare you for moments in your own life.

Confront denial: Acknowledge what is happening without minimizing the situation.

Create a risk assessment & safety plan: Assess the level of threat. Create a plan with contingencies to navigate an inherently volatile situation.

Determine your approach:

    • De-escalate the aggressor: What words could you say to create a shift? What body language might be helpful?
      Support the person targeted: Check in, if possible, about what they need; see that their safety and/or emotional needs are being met. Even sitting beside the person target can help them feel supported.
    • Mobilize others: Are there others that could act to help also? Providing them with clear direction can help activate them.
    • Create a distraction: This could release the pressure in an intense situation, allowing some amount of de-escalation to happen naturally, or for the person targeted to get away.
    • Aftercare for the person targeted or others: Oftentimes forgotten in these situations, caring for someone’s emotional or physical needs after an attack is just as important as intervention. Oftentimes in a situation involving more than one bystander, people take on different roles. All of these roles are necessary.
    • Support accountability: People who act aggressively oftentimes attempt to avoid responsibility for their actions. Supporting accountability could be retelling what you witnessed to other community members, or helping maintain their presence in the area while others arrive.

When Feeling Safe Isn’t Enough

When I took my IMPACT class years ago, I thought my biggest concern was safety. And it was, in many ways. My fear of violence really affected my life in a negative way. However, my biggest concerns could have been better described as:

  • wanting to understand how to trust others in a way that was more nuanced than an all-or-nothing approach
  • wanting to understand how I could speak up for myself without feeling mean
  • wanting to feel –not just know– that my body belonged to me & I could dictate my experiences
  • wanting to understand that previous bad experiences were not my fault & yet that they didn’t have to be repeated

Another IMPACT chapter recently noted that concern about safety was not the top reason why students enrolled in their classes. That initially surprised me, and I wondered if that could possibly be true for our students if we surveyed them.

I read the director’s email, and I noted that the top reasons for registrations in their chapter actually echoed many of my feelings and things I’ve heard in classes.

Listening closer to participants in recent classes, I noticed people talking about wanting:

  • to be able to protect their families
  • to heal from past hurts when they’d hit a wall with their progress
  • to be more assertive in their professional & personal lives
  • to be able to control their anger
  • to not have to ignore homeless people & others on the street
  • to have better relationships
  • to not always be kicking themselves after a difficult conversation with things they wish they had said.

While I believe feeling safe is an underlying aspect of being able to address all of these other issues, I love and feel honored to be a part of a curriculum that people feel they can come to in order to address such diverse needs.

Train for Hard Times So that Everyday Life Is Easy(er)

Most of us understand that running on the treadmill, racing across a court to hit a ball and lifting large amounts of weight has no real inherent value or direct translation into everyday life. It’s very unlikely I’ll need to run five miles, be able to respond to a flying object or lift 100 pounds in modern daily life.

Yet, practicing for these situations makes it so that everyday activities like climbing the stairs to my apartment, keeping up with a small child and lifting a suitcase all become considerably easier than they would be otherwise. We train hard so that everyday life is easy.

Similarly, in IMPACT classes, we practice de-escalating situations with irrational yelling men; we practice getting out of or defending ourselves in situations with rapists and murderers and practice setting boundaries with people in our daily lives. Hopefully we never have to use the more drastic skills in real life. If we do, at least we’ve learned strategies to be better prepared for these difficult situations. Yet setting boundaries with people we know is the most frequent scenario our students experience.

We practice beyond those situations (over-train) for the same reason we might choose to exercise. Climbing the stairs daily doesn’t make them that easy to climb. It’s the muscles I’ve built in the gym or on the field that make the stairs pale in comparison.
When we develop our capacity to deal with the terror and adrenaline we might feel with rape and murder, we learn we can get through the discomfort of giving a co-worker difficult feedback. We know we can deal with a partner’s pain when we say that something needs to change in order for it to work. We can navigate the fear of rejection we might feel when telling a date we aren’t ready for intimacy or when standing up to a bully or harsh family member.
Being able to knock someone out is simply of no use to us if we can’t or don’t communicate with those closest to us. We must learn to face the truly difficult situations in order to develop our skills to face deeply uncomfortable situations.
The paradox in this case, of course, is that by developing the skills to defend ourselves, we greatly reduce our chances of ever needing to do so physically. All of this becomes possible because we were willing to over-train ourselves once.

Why We Set Boundaries

People sometimes tell me that they hate conflict, and so setting boundaries is difficult for them. In reality, learning to set boundaries is perfect for the person who wants to avoid conflict because it prevents conflict from arising or becoming worse.

The true function of boundary-setting is to prevent problems from building up to the point that:

• You eventually explode and jeopardize the relationship;
• You avoid the person and/or have to end the relationship; or,
• It escalates into a more serious issue where physical or sexual assault may occur.

Boundary-setting does not mean asking for everything to go your way. It is not really a “boundary” for me to say, “I feel uncomfortable when you snort when you laugh. I need you to stop.” However, if a behavior is happening that may lead to one of the three points above, it’s my responsibility to bring it up.

Think about how shocking and awful it would feel for you to find out that you’d been doing something for months that significantly bothered someone you care about. Wouldn’t you want a chance to change it before your friend exploded or started avoiding you? Once it gets to that point, changing patterns is far more difficult. There may be serious hurts that have to be navigated and overcome.

Boundary-setting is personal safety.  Setting boundaries can create emotional safety in relationships as well as prevent assault.

It’s incredibly unlikely for the stranger on the street to assault us. Even when a stranger crosses our boundaries verbally, we don’t think nearly as much of it as when a family, friend or co-worker does the same. These are the skills that we need not only to stay safe, but also to create easier, joyful and fulfilling relationships.

Powerful Words: Verbal Strategies for Prevention

I recently gained perspective on the importance of verbal skills while traveling internationally in areas where I did not speak the language.

I am used to answering my own, infrequent “what would I do if…?” questions.  My response is typically a variation of “Well, I’d talk with him, set a boundary, and it would be clear that I’m not an easy victim…  Or I’d go get help…”  Only after exhausting all of these options would I consider physical skills.

During the time I spent alone on my trip, however, I realized that I really wasn’t able to have that conversation to prove that I wasn’t the target assailants look for.  I realized, “Well, I could say “no” and yell a bunch, but I really wouldn’t be able to say much.”  If it kept escalating, I’d have to turn to physical skills.  Not having the necessary language skills, I’d have no other recourse but to use a strike.  Mind you, nothing untoward happened to me nor did I anticipate anything like that, but I returned home with a new awareness of what happens when a person lacks options.

It was amazing for me to see this, because we work regularly now with young people in the schools – many of whom actually do feel confident with  (and have used) physical skills.  But they have no verbal skills to speak of.  It is not unlike the absence of language entirely to not have the vocabulary to get out of a threatening situation.  And I felt for these young people who get in trouble for using physical violence when words would have been sufficient.  They just don’t have the words.

Teaching verbal strategies and a vocabulary of avoidance and de-escalation is much easier than learning a foreign language, let me tell you!  And we must provide it to them.  Because if we don’t, they will act like a cornered animal who either submits to violence or lashes out him/herself.  IMPACT helps people stand up for themselves.  Teaching students ways to do that before it gets physical may be the most important thing we do.

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