On Tuesday, April 29, students gathered in the Public Affairs Center (PAC) for a bystander intervention training workshop hosted by WesWell’s We Speak We Stand program. The workshop focused on providing participants with skills to intervene in situations on campus in order to prevent relationship violence and sexual assault. The workshop was led by We Speak We Stand intern Willa Beckman ’15 and Sexual Assault Resource Coordinator Alysha Warren.

Beckman and Warren led the training, asking students to participate in small group activities as well as in the larger discussion. Warren described student participation as crucial to the event’s success.

“What I enjoy the most about doing these workshops is when students are…sharing their personal experiences, because that means that it’s resonating,” Warren said.

At the beginning of the workshop, participants were asked to anonymously fill out a sheet of bystander personal preventions, or reasons that would keep one from stepping into a situation. The sheet included reasons such as “I do not want to offend anyone” and “I’m not responsible for other people’s decisions.” The group then discussed the psychology behind these barriers and how to overcome them.

Jackie Freed ’15 found this section of the workshop to be the most helpful.

“I think just going through the barriers of intervention and then just going through the ways to respond is very important, because a lot of people, especially with Wesleyan’s unique party and hook-up scene——————-people don’t necessarily feel comfortable intervening,” Freed said.-

Beckman described four main strategies to intervene as a bystander:  “I” statements, humor, “bringing it home,” and “we’re all friends, right?” “Bringing it home” refers to reminding those involved how they would feel to be in the other person’s shoes; “We’re all friends, right?” refers to keeping the intervention as caring and non-critical as possible.

Warren described why these types of statements, as well as other solutions to intervening discussed in the workshop, are important to campus dialogue surrounding sexual violence.

“I think these workshops are important because they provide tangible skills that they can take back to their communities, and it provides a tool to respond to sexual violence,” Warren said. “Because we’re having a lot of dialogue, and I think that that’s wonderful, but I think it’s also important that we’re talking about what can we do about it. And I think these workshops provide that opportunity.”

Beckman described why workshops such as bystander intervention training are more productive than sexual assault prevention campaigns that place focus on the survivors.

“There have been various other campaigns that try to stop sexual assault and a lot of them in the past have focused on the victim, which creates a lot of victim blaming and adds into rape culture,” Beckman said. “That…causes a lot of guilt and shame, and it’s not effective. So what bystander intervention does is it puts the responsibility on everyone to intervene and everyone to prevent sexual violence.”

After tackling different skills and strategies of intervening, the group discussed rape culture as a whole. One exercise, called “The Continuum of Harm,” required each small group to order different cultural norms and scenarios from least to most harmful.

Andrew Trexler ’14, who has attended several similar workshops prior to Tuesday’s, found this activity to be the most interesting.

“‘The Contin—-uum of Harm’ exercise has changed over time a little bit, and it’s always interesting to see how other people map things,” Trexler said. “I find, myself, I’m always trying to move things up, so it’s hard to put things in an actual continuum because they are all harmful.”

Warren continued the workshop by discussing other larger issues that lead to scenarios in which bystander intervention is necessary, such as the gendered language behind rape culture.

Hannah Eisner ’17 described her interest in how bystander intervention training applies to a more theoretical discourse, and the difficulties in combining theory with real-life scenarios.

“I really wanted to be picking up on the problematic gender things [in the workshop],” Eisner said. “To a certain extent, they tried really hard to be super inclusive, but it ultimately became about a heteronormative model. Which is really hard, because the conversation wasn’t about that political critique.”

Participants walked away from the workshop with new skills; however, Beckman described the difficulty behind tracking progress.

“The goal is prevention, and that’s why it can be really frustrating or difficult to track because you’re like, well we don’t know if reporting is going up, which is generally a good thing, or if we’re actually not making a difference,” Beckman said. “But I think it’s been going really well. And just the fact that now when you say the words ‘bystander intervention’ on this campus, most people will at least have heard of them and have some sense of what they mean; that’s already a huge change.”