Tag: bystander issues

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.

Violent Acts Aren’t Committed in Isolation

How do we cope, how do we respond when overwhelmed with the grief of the past weeks? Orlando. Brock Turner. The man who allegedly murdered his wife and four daughters in Roswell last week.

For some, it seems that we have to choose a focus. That’s simply not true. Homophobic violence and gender-based violence have everything to do with one another. Studies show how deeply connected they are. They are connected in the people who commit these crimes and hold these beliefs, and they’re connected for those of us who feel doubly hurt after these past weeks. Survivors and LGBT people have had our vulnerability to violence confirmed this past week. For most of us, and especially for people of color, this is something we live with and navigate every day, but it is now intensified.

Violence is never just the act of a single person. This is hard to accept when we want to pin the blame, understandably so, on the person who doesn’t even understand what he did was rape and was wrong. It’s hard to accept when we know that a single person walked into a club and committed so many murders in our Latinx LGBT community in a single night. We want evil to be something separate from us. We want to be able to take a quick action – blame – and be done with it. Accepting the idea that the sexism, homophobia, transphobia and racism rampant in our society created these acts is difficult to bear, and the responsibility of prevention is overwhelming.
But we know these acts are not isolated incidents. When 1 in 5 women experience rape, and 1 in 3 transgender women of color is murdered – the acts committed in these last two weeks are connected to larger systems of violence and oppression. Fear shapes the daily choices of women and LGBT people of color, and it is our responsibility as a society to change this.
How? Intervention. Intervention is not only acting when we see a man on top of an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. Intervention cannot only be stopping a man in Los Angeles with explosives and guns driving to a Pride celebration. Intervention and prevention must occur earlier.
Slurs, disguised as jokes, teasing and “edgy” comments, are commonplace. Say something. When you hear these things at the dinner table with family, in the school hallway, locker room, church or other religious gathering place – say something. Write a letter when you see a TV show or commercial promoting sexism, homophobia, transphobia or racism.
Tell them you won’t watch or buy their product anymore. Ask schools and teachers what they are doing to proactively address these themes, not just react after an act of bullying or sexual harassment or assault has occurred.
We can absolutely expect this violence – everyday incidents and national news – to continue if we don’t change these beliefs that are rampant in our society.
Finally, I join others in asking you to stay present to the pain of this moment and avoid moving into xenophobia. Please consider reaching out to those in your life who might be more affected by this – including our Muslim and Sikh neighbors and friends, who we fear might be at greater risk during this time.

It is extremely difficult to talk about and bear witness to violence. Remembering our outrage, shock and pain six months from now and working to make sustained change is even harder. Please remember. Please continue working to create change. Some do not have the privilege of forgetting the threat of events like these.

Not Quite Enough: White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault

Recently, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault announced a series of actions to: (1) identify the scope of the problem on college campuses, (2) help prevent campus sexual assault, (3) help schools respond effectively when a student is assaulted, and (4) improve, and make more transparent, the federal government’s enforcement efforts.

These are all fantastic steps, and a huge growth in efforts and attention after several courageous survivors exposed the gross neglect and response to sexual assault on college campuses.

So, what is missing? Women. All of the prevention efforts are focused on bystander education and men’s intervention.

This is great, and all of us in the violence prevention arena agree that it takes men and women working together to end the cycle of violence. The vast majority of men are good. Most people want to help, and just need to learn how. Changing social norms through education about consent and bystander education is something IMPACT does and collaborates with others in the community to do as well.

However, research has shown that traditional gender role norms contribute to a culture that permits sexual violence. And yet, this important effort to end sexual violence is promoting an approach that does just that. Instead of men as perpetrators, it attempts to replace that with men as protectors and interveners. In both scenarios, women are still cast as victims without agency, with men in control.

As our colleague Martha Thompson at Impact Chicago writes, “The message of the White House Task Force that women should focus their attention on awareness of risks and avoiding danger because only men can stop another man from rape and sexual assault is an obsolete message.”

Those of us who work with survivors know of the incredible strength they have. It takes strength to come forward and report. It takes strength to break patterns; to risk losing one’s social status or job; to jeopardize relationships with family and friends; it takes strength to tell complete strangers some of the worst moments of your life.

Women and others targeted for sexual violence have an incredible amount of strength. That strength can be used for preventing violence as well. Women are also able to act as active bystanders. And research repeatedly shows that resistance is effective in reducing the likelihood of an assault being completed, and that resistance does not “make a situation worse.”

We need to examine prevention efforts to be sure they don’t contain echoes of the same gender norms that create gender-based violence in the first place. I greatly appreciate the avoidance of victim-blaming in the White House report, but excluding women entirely is not the answer. Instead, we need to engage women and others targeted for violence in prevention efforts that do not buy into oppression.

It is crucial that we, as a society, develop a comprehensive solution to ending sexual assault – one that includes all genders and one that emphasizes community change as well as individual agency.

Ignoring It Doesn’t Always Make It Better

Many of us received the same advice for harassment and bullying as we did for bees: ignore it, and it’ll go away.

While that strategy has worked for me countless times with bees, the truth is that it is only one of many strategies for dealing with problems and conflict. And oftentimes this coping mechanism really doesn’t work the way we want.

One of the key reasons ignoring it doesn’t always make harassment and conflict go away is that the problems are often systemic.

A child being harassed for wearing glasses or hand-me-down clothes is likely experiencing poor treatment because of how s/he looks or the economic status of his/her family. A teen girl who is harassed on the street is experiencing sexism, and depending on how she is perceived, could also be experiencing other biases. A boy harassed because of the way he walks or his lisp could be experiencing homophobia, transphobia and/or sexism.

Ignoring the problem ultimately doesn’t make the problem go away because the harassers, bullies and assailants are working with the same book. The minute one person stops making comments about your weight or skin color, the next one moves in – or they move on to someone else. Their biases don’t disappear just because a particular incident ends.

At IMPACT, we teach about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, etc. in order to become more effective agents of change and prevent violence from growing in our communities.

We also explore various responses we might have to harassment. Some days I just want it to end, so I simply walk away or ignore it. Other days I feel up to telling the person to stop and that it’s not okay and leaving it at that. Other days I feel ready to take on the entire issue, educating the aggressor by addressing the behavior and the bias behind it.

As bystanders, we have choices of how and when to act as an ally to the targeted person — sometimes that’s intervening during the incident itself; other times it involves approaching the person targeted to express support or approaching the person who is using hurtful behavior to educate and hold that person accountable.

Depending on the context and environment and the day we’re having, sometimes as bystanders and as those targeted ourselves, we feel safe and are ready for different levels of struggle and different levels of self-advocacy and advocacy for others.

The idea is to have a range of tools for dealing with harassment and bullying so that we can be as proactive as possible. With this knowledge, we can work to make our communities feel safer and stronger together.

Preparing for Safety and Success in School

Families have a long to-do list when preparing for the new school year. We buy growing children new clothes or figure out hand-me-downs, gather pencils and notebooks… And when the first day comes, it can be filled with excitement or dread!

Every child loves learning. You only need to watch an infant learning to crawl or walk to see their pride at mastering a new skill.

So, why is it that getting kids to school can be so difficult at times? For many of us, it was the social arena that proved the most stressful part of school, not the big test coming up.

How many of us would have concentrated better in school or had better attendance if we had the skills to deal with problems that came up with friendships, classmates, and people we interacted with on the way to school?

When youth have a plan for dealing with a stressful social situation, it means they can choose a strategy to deal with the issue as it arises, and then put the thought away. But when a concern arises and they don’t have a strategy, this unsolved issue makes it very difficult to concentrate on what is in front of them.

When youth have the skills to speak up and take action against bias, social cruelty, bullying, harassment and exclusion, as well as answer the “what if it gets worse?” question in their minds, our communities are safer and more supportive for everyone. Individual students can spend more time learning & succeeding and less time worrying about their social interactions.

It can be frightening to address our fears about our children head on, but we do it. We do it so they are prepared for security and success. We do it with fire safety; we do it with car and bicycle safety. We can also do it with personal safety.

How Leaders Should Speak about Sexual Assault

Todd Akin’s recent comments give us an important opportunity to consider what a true leader for our communities should be saying about sexual assault.
Leadership means sometimes saying things that challenge the social norm. And let’s be clear- in a country where 1 in 3 women experience sexual assault, accepting rape as a tragic yet inevitable part of life for women is the norm.
True leaders would denounce rape unequivocally and state clearly that the blame always lies with the rapist and never the victim. True leaders would acknowledge that there are few consequences for rapists today. They would acknowledge that when 1 in 3 women experience sexual assault, as a society we are doing something to create rapists. They would understand this requires committing to deep cultural changes and invest time and energy into making this happen in our schools and in our media.
True leaders would also acknowledge the power and bravery that women and girls do possess – in their abilities to learn to speak out about what’s happened to them, advocate for themselves and others, and defend themselves in a culture that is otherwise not supporting them and keeping them safe.

Creating change with sexual assault requires a full systems approach. Preventing a sexual assault for one woman is not enough. Even sending one man to prison is not enough. If we truly want our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our wives and our friends to be safe, we need to create change on a much larger level. Our nation’s dialogue about rape deserves more attention than a footnote in a conversation about contraception. It’s up to our leaders to initiate and support these changes.Let’s take this opportunity to re-focus on what we want to see in our leaders and our society, not just what we don’t want.

Why Do We Watch Real-Life Violence?

Just before the Penn State scandal broke out and garnered so much attention because a popular man did nothing, there was a video of a Texas judge whipping his daughter that was making its way around the television news and the Internet. I was at the gym when I saw it on the news.

I was on my way out, so I googled it later. Unfortunately, I consider it a part of my job to know about the horrible incidences of violence being discussed in pop culture.

According to the article I read on the LA Times website, 695,000 people watched it on YouTube in the week it had been up. That same morning, I got an email from Change.org asking me to sign a petition in response to a video recorded in a classroom of one student beating another student because he was gay. There was a link to watch the video.

We used to ask ourselves why we watched so much violence in the media—in movies, television shows, etc. Now the question I ask is: why are we watching these videos of actual, real violence? Before, unless it was my family or I lived next door perhaps, I wouldn’t see real-life family violence. I wouldn’t see the physical assault of a gay teenager unless I went to that school. These are the sorts of things that turn our stomachs. They should. That feeling in the pit of your stomach is your body’s signal to you that something is wrong. If you witness or experience violence or the signals of impending violence, that signal is there to tell you to get away, defend yourself, or do something to minimize the violence as much as possible.

Why are we watching these videos?

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I think—perhaps generously—many watch them as a way of thinking that they are helping. People think that by watching the video and talking about it that they will change the culture somehow. I don’t want to be crude here, but no—that’s gossip. Just talking about what happened next door or across the country is just another way of doing nothing.

The Change.org email was at least asking readers to sign a petition. You see, the student who physically assaulted the other student was suspended from school for only three days. Can you imagine how terrified the other student must have been to return to school and see his assailant again so soon after the assault? We may have differing ideas about what an effective solution might be (personally I would go for educating the aggressor about issues of violence rather than relying on suspension time alone), but that email at least was attempting to do something.

Watching videos of real-life assaults doesn’t just do nothing, it undoes something. It undoes your natural response to that feeling in your stomach. It normalizes the behavior that you are seeing. If you were appalled by violence in the media before, this is something that should make you scream. Seeing violence should make us act. Simple. It should make us all call the police. It should make us make a scene or defend ourselves or others in some way. It should make us call our local crisis center or mentoring agency and ask how we can get involved. It should make us do something. Talking and “awareness” alone doesn’t cut it.

Self-Sufficiency

The advice I got growing up about safety was to stay in groups and if anything happens, go to the nearest store for help.

This spring has brought out the hiker in me – and that hiker is at odds with the advice I received growing up.  I love to hike alone, and there clearly are no convenience stores nearby.  Since numerous students in our classes ask to prepare for the “hiking alone” scenario, it seems that many feel that hiking is taking a great risk.

But as I pass pleasant, quiet men and women walking alone with their happy-go-lucky dogs, I’ve been wondering why we were told to take precautions instead of go enjoy our alone time.

Somehow, we have been taught that the unknown attendant in the gas station is better prepared to deal with the situation we’re facing than we ourselves are.  In truth, he probably has nothing more going for him than having access to a phone to call the police.

Who -really- is better able to defend me, than me? After all, others may not have any skills we do not have or cannot get.  Certainly, receiving help is wonderful and speaks well of the community around us – but there is no good reason to not become experts about our own safety.  There is no reason to not feel self-sufficient.

Experts are available for two important reasons: things we cannot handle on our own, or to teach us how to handle things better for ourselves.  The more we use experts to teach us to be self-reliant, the fewer situations we will experience where we need an expert’s help for things we cannot handle.  Good safety experts don’t tell you what precautions to take; they empower you to be in charge of your own safety.

It Takes a Village

“It Takes a Village…” – on Bystanders

The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” has become very popular in the United States in recent years.  Similarly, it takes a community to stay safe.  It requires that we look out for one another and one another’s children rather than say, “Oh, that’s the police’s job.” Or, “I’m sure they’re taking care of that at school.”  Or, “I’m sure CYFD’s already been called” or, “It’s none of my business.”

To have a safe community requires that each of us act when we see or suspect an act of violence.  It doesn’t, however, require that we jump into the middle of the fray.  First of all, the risk of getting physically involved may be too great, and we may be unable to stay safe in our efforts to help.  Also, there might be an even better tool to use, like getting a person of authority involved.

In order to be able to care for others, we must first care for ourselves.  Have you ever listened when the flight attendant explains oxygen mask protocol?  First you should secure your own mask before helping a child or another person with his/hers.  The reason is very practical: if you stop breathing, you will not be much help to that other person.  And, of course, after securing our own masks, we would all certainly help that other person.

The same is true for other safety issues.  If we can ensure our own safety, why wouldn’t we help when we saw an act of violence; whether it seemed to be an assailant against a stranger, a husband against his wife, or a parent against a child?

At IMPACT, we teach that personal safety is about assessing the situation as well as the tools that we have to be safe.  The same is useful for community safety.  Maybe my best tool is my cell phone and calling 911 when I hear shouting and glass breaking in the apartment next door.  Maybe my brother’s best tool when seeing a guy trying to take a drunk woman home is to offer her a ride home himself and to tell the guy it’s not going to happen.

As a small woman, am I going to be the best person to break up a fight between two guys in a parking lot?  Probably not.  I teach self-defense; I can keep myself safe.  So, why not?  Just as assailants target their intended victims in different ways based on how they perceive them, if I intervene when I see someone being threatened or assaulted, how I’m perceived is also going to play a role in how effective I am.

We all have to assess our best tools.  Anyone who tells you that there is a set formula for dealing with these difficult issues is not acknowledging their complexity.  There are many ways of helping out and staying safe.  It might look different for different people with different skills.  It’s not to say that one way is right and one is wrong.  It’s about determining what tools we have in different situations.

It takes all of us to keep our communities safe.

The way I as a small woman who teaches violence prevention and self-defense interacts with a situation will be different than a large man with no formal training.

However, just as when keeping ourselves safe, we have to decide:  What is going on?  What tools do I have to best handle the situation?
It is our responsibility to help when another person’s wellbeing is at stake.  However, that doesn’t mean jumping into the middle of the fray.  Believing that we have to tackle someone to keep them safe is the same simple mistake that people make when they assume that “personal safety” and “self-defense” only address physical skills.
It’s true – any decision we make around safety is a calculated risk.  At IMPACT, we talk about assessing the situation as well as the tools that we have.  So, if I witness a scenario where two men are fighting outside of a bar and one draws a knife-  am I going to jump in there?  No!  My best tool for that scenario is my cell phone.  Now, if I see children getting into trouble in my neighborhood, what is my best tool?

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