I've Got Your Back

Arteaga Jorge Arteaga

Description

Right to Be's accessible and engaging step-by-step instructional guide to safe and effective bystander interventionBystander intervention is simply overcoming that "freeze" instinct when you witness harassment and getting back to the very human desire to take care of one another. It's not about being the hero, strapping on spandex, and saving the day. And it certainly isn't about sacrificing your own safety. From the nonprofit organization Right to Be (formerly Hollaback!), I've Got Your Back teaches readers the ins and outs of bystander intervention using Right to Be's methodology: the 5D's of bystander intervention-distract, delegate, document, delay, and direct. Each chapter of the book dives deeply into what these D's can look like in practice, whether you are in public, online, or at work. The rise in interest in bystander intervention comes at a moment when trust in the institutions historically responsible for keeping us safe is crumbling. However, as trust in our systems falters, trust in our own agency and our own ability to create change is rising. Perhaps for the first time we see that our actions matter. Or, at a minimum, we know our actions are the only thing we can truly control. We all have a role to play when it comes to ending hate and harassment in our communities. If you're new to these efforts, I've Got Your Back will give you the skills to get started. And if you've been doing this work for years, this book will provide you with the language to mentor others just beginning their journey.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647006839
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

We want to dedicate this book to the thousands of people who have trusted us with their stories over the past fifteen years. Your bravery made this book possible .
Contents
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
CHAPTER 2
The Problem with Harassment
CHAPTER 3
Reasons Not to Intervene
CHAPTER 4
What Kind of Bystander are You?
CHAPTER 5
DISTRACT
CHAPTER 6
DELEGATE
CHAPTER 7
DOCUMENT
CHAPTER 8
DELAY
CHAPTER 9
DIRECT
CHAPTER 10
How to Manage Trauma and Build Resilience
CHAPTER 11
Bystander Intervention as a Way of Life
RESOURCES
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENDNOTES
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

For most of us, the desire to intervene in moments of harassment starts with a story.
It might be our own story, when someone treated us as less than just for being ourselves. It might have been a slur, an unwanted touch, or that slow-but-steady feeling of social exclusion.
It might be someone else s story. Someone we cared about. Someone whose sense of possibility and belonging was slowly chipped away by the world around them. Someone we didn t know how to help.
Or, we may have unintentionally done some of these things to others-not knowing, or understanding, how it made the other person feel.
Most likely you ve experienced all three. And as challenging, confusing, and even traumatic as these experiences may be, they got you to exactly where you need to be. Right here. Welcome.
By picking up this book, you re setting an intention for a different type of world. A world where, yes, harassment may still happen. But when it happens, there will be someone who stands up against it.
It is our deepest hope and desire that person will be you.
WHAT IS BYSTANDER INTERVENTION?
If I was to have a medical emergency, you d know what to do. If I dropped my hat on the street, you d know what to do. But when people experience and witness harassment, they freeze.
Bystander intervention is simply overcoming that freezing instinct so we can return to, and act on, that very human desire to take care of one another. It s not about being the hero, strapping on superhero spandex and saving the day. And it certainly isn t about sacrificing your own safety.
There is nothing new or innovative about people taking care of people. And yet it is an exciting reversal in a culture that normalizes violence and isolation.
I ve Got Your Back is a culmination of the 500,000+ people we ve trained in bystander intervention since 2012 at our organization, Right To Be. Our training and methodology has grown and adapted over time, and in the past few years, we ve seen a dramatic surge of interest in bystander intervention. In 2020, we trained six times more people than we did in 2019, and the demand has only grown since then. At the time of this writing, we re training hundreds of people each day in bystander intervention.
Bystander intervention is an idea as old as time. It s the idea that as a community, we ve got us.
HOW DO YOU INTERVENE?
This book will teach you how to intervene using Right To Be s methodology, the 5Ds of bystander intervention: Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay, and Direct. Each of these approaches is designed to prioritize the needs of the person being harassed while mitigating risk to yourself.
LET S TALK ABOUT WHAT THE 5DS CAN LOOK LIKE IN ACTION:
1. DISTRACT
Creating a distraction to de-escalate the situation.
Distraction draws attention away from the intensity of the harassment and ultimately de-escalates the situation. For example, you could drop your coffee, and people would scramble to help you clean it up or avoid the mess. You could also start a conversation with the person experiencing the harassment. Here, the idea is to build a safe space with the person being harassed while denying the person doing the harassing from getting the attention they are seeking.
2. DELEGATE
Finding someone else to help.
Our favorite potential delegate is the person right next to us. Like us, they could share the very human desire to take care of other people. Unlike us, they probably haven t written this book. Asking them to document a situation, intervene directly, or go and grab the manager while you monitor a situation are simple ways to create support for yourself when intervening, as well as for the person being harassed. You can also reach out to your HR department if you re at work and/or the social media companies where the harassment is occurring-but it s best to check in with the person being harassed first.
3. DOCUMENT
Creating documentation and giving it to the person who was harassed.
Whether you re using your cell phone camera, pen and paper, or saving screenshots and hyperlinks, documentation is powerful. It offers power back to the person being harassed and gives them the reassurance that what happened was wrong-while simultaneously giving them the concrete evidence they will need if they decide to report it.
4. DELAY
Checking in on the person who experienced the harassment.
Sometimes the harassment occurs too quickly for any intervention during the moment, so your intervention happens after the fact, and hence, is delayed. When this happens, a quick check-in can remind the person that what happened wasn t okay and that anyone would be upset by it. When you delay, you re showing them that you ve got their back regardless of what they choose to do about it (even if they choose to do nothing).
5. DIRECT
Setting a boundary with the person doing the harassing, and then turning your attention to the person being harassed.
This is the most misunderstood of the 5Ds. It s easy to assume that it s about telling off the person doing the harassing, or at the very least, educating them. But it s not really about them at all-or even about you, for that matter. Like all of the 5Ds, it s about prioritizing the person being harassed. Start by setting a boundary: Say, Hey, what did you mean by that? or, That s so disrespectful; give them some space. Then turn your energy away from the person doing the harassing toward the person being harassed. As tempting as it may be, don t get into a back and forth. People actively harassing others aren t in a mindset to learn at that exact moment anyway.
WHERE DID THE 5DS COME FROM?
Like all good ideas, Right To Be s 5Ds weren t developed in isolation. Inspired by the stories submitted to Right To Be, Emily reached out to an organization named Alteristic (then Green Dot). They had an approach to bystander intervention that was gaining popularity at campuses across the country: the 3Ds. The 3Ds included Direct, Delegate, and Distract.
Emily approached them with the idea of expanding the 3Ds to apply to street harassment. The founder and president, Dorothy J. Edwards, PhD, and her colleague at the time, Jennifer Messina, readily agreed. In 2012, Right To Be launched the I ve Got Your Back campaign and started training people to intervene. As people began intervening, Right To Be mapped their positive actions on our app with green dots, in a map filled with pink dots indicating harassment.
The work grew from there. Slowly but surely, interest in bystander intervention and demand for our training grew. Along with it, we heard thousands of stories from folks about what worked and what didn t. We iterated our approach as we listened and learned. In 2015, we added Delay to expand the 3Ds to 4Ds and in 2017, we added Document to complete the 5Ds of bystander intervention, at the recommendation of our partners at WITNESS, an international nonprofit organization that helps people use video and technology to protect and defend human rights. We then expanded the curriculum to address harassment online in 2016, at work in 2018, and then built upon our online harassment work even further in partnership with Viktorya Vilk at PEN America in 2020.
Data shows the training works. In a content analysis of stories submitted to Right To Be before we started training folks in bystander intervention (2005-2011), bystanders had about a 50 percent chance of increasing trauma. Often, this resulted from either bystanders failing to do anything at all-or from bystanders blaming the person who was harassed in the process of intervening (for example, bystanders making comments like, Oh honey, you know you can t wear that at night if you re going out by yourself ).
Now, we ve found that 98 percent of people who attend our trainings leave confident there is at least one thing they can do to address harassment the next time they see it, despite most of them having entered the training with significant hesitations. 1 Perhaps even more impressive: Of our attendees who ve witnessed harassment since their training with us, 75 percent reported that they intervened. 2
THIS IS THE MOMENT FOR BYSTANDER INTERVENTION
The rise in interest in bystander intervention comes at a moment of failing trust in the institutions expected to keep us safe. Across the world, we re watching a dramatic rise in harassment against our most marginalized communities.
This book is filled with stories of harassment-and stories of hope and intervention. As you read through these stories, they may bring up a lot of emotions, and perhaps, memories of your own experiences of harassment. Some may be things that happened yesterday; others you may not have thought about in years. This is normal.
As authors, our intention in sharing these stories is to invite you to face the realities of harassment and to listen deeply to the people impacted by harassment. But we also want to invite you to take care of yourself as you do so. It s okay to take breaks, to pause, to breathe. If you need support processing what comes up for you, skip ahead to Chapter 10 , on Resilience.
Whatever may surface for you as you read this book is surfacing for good reason. In the past few years, we ve seen spike after spike in incidents of harassment. Here are a few examples from the US alone:
After the 2016 US pres