Bystander Intervention, Anti-Blackness, and Police Brutality
A few years back, I was facilitating a Bringing in the Bystander College Train-the-Trainer Workshop and a participant pulled me to the side during a break. They asked,
Why wouldn’t we just tell students to call the police? That’s the right thing to do.
My easy answer for this participant was that BITB College never asserts that there is a right way to intervene. As facilitators of BITB College, we are cultivating pro-social bystanders who are aware of their surroundings and intervene to de-escalate violence safely.
There are many reasons why survivors of sexual assault or intimate partner violence may not want to report to the police. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about this participant’s question in light of George Floyd’s murder by police and state-sanctioned violence against Black people such as Breonna Taylor, Tony Dade, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and so many others. In 2020 so far, Black people account for 28% of people killed by police despite being only 13% of the U.S. population. Black Lives Matter, and our criminal legal and police systems are often not a site of justice for Black people.
In a recent BITB Virtual Water Cooler, a participant recently asked the following timely question:
How can we align our bystander intervention work with movements to end racism and anti-Blackness?
At Soteria Solutions, we’ve been thinking about the importance of doing the following and welcome your ideas:
Learn the history of anti-violence movements, as they were founded and led by Black women and femmes.
Recognize that gender-based violence and racialized violence are not separate but are as entangled as systems of oppression. We won’t end gender-based violence without ending racism and anti-Blackness.
Defer to the leadership of Black women and femmes by attending their training sessions, hiring them as consultants, reading what they have to share, and donating. Here are a few organizations and individuals that can serve as a starting point: Swan Center for Advocacy and Research, Black Women’s Blueprint, Chimi Boyd Keyes, Women of Color Network, me too, and Wagatwe Wanjuki.
Make the connections between the roles bystanders have played in sharing information about police brutality, sexual violence, and other forms of harm. Police brutality is not new, but it is being filmed. Bystanders have taken steps to call attention to what is happening to Black people by intervening at a distance and with others.
Provide a wide range of ways to intervene outside of calling the police (directly or indirectly). The best way for us to intervene is as early as possible before sexual violence occurs and in ways that are subtle.
Be a role model. We know that others are more likely to intervene if they see someone else intervening. If you say something when you notice a microaggression based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and/or other identities, your impact can have a ripple effect.
Create strong partnerships with organizations on your campus and in your community working to address racism and anti-Blackness.
Teach decisional balance skills. Decisional balance is a bystander skill that involves weighing a variety of options and making the safest possible choice for the situation. Police brutality is a part of this crucial context to our decision-making, and it is imperative that we both widen choices and options for our participants and validate concerns students, particularly Black students, have about calling the police.
Normalize fear, reluctance, or refusal to reach out to certain resources. As facilitators of bystander intervention programs, we do not want to correct participants about their perceptions of what resources are or aren’t available to them and their safety in accessing them. We do want to help them brainstorm other options and share their wisdom with the group. If you work closely with these resources or staff them yourselves, feedback from bystander intervention workshops can be a valuable starting point for additional training for staff or can provide an impetus to cultivate an anonymous feedback process or advisory board.
At Soteria Solutions, we have been asking ourselves a third question:
In what ways is our work at Soteria Solutions evolving to better foster racial justice and end oppression?
As bystanders, our goal is to de-escalate violence and mitigate harm. Therefore, it is crucial for bystanders to continue to educate themselves on the context in which they are intervening while also working toward a world without anti-Blackness, racism, and police brutality. Therefore, we have been taking the steps listed above ourselves.
Bringing in the Bystander was developed nearly 20 years ago at a predominantly White university located in a predominantly White state. Early in the program’s development and subsequent evaluation, we recognized the need to test the program’s effectiveness on more diverse campuses and we thus partnered with other institutions to better understand its effectiveness beyond our homogeneous population. Research findings suggest efficacy with diverse campus populations and the need to adapt key elements of the curriculum to meet the target audiences’ identities and needs.
In the third iteration of Bringing in the Bystander we made several key changes:
As we developed the third version of BITB, we reviewed our curriculum to ensure our language aligned with our social justice lens. This shift included changing our definition of a “bystander” to align with witnessing harm rather than witnessing criminal events.
We have emphasized broadening bystanders’ choices and options for intervention and de-emphasized calling the police.
We added crucial conversations on how identity impacts bystanders and how they intervene as well as how consequences of violence are exacerbated for survivors impacted by oppressive systems including survivors who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
We are seeking Black and Indigenous people and people of color for open employment positions and positions on our Board of Directors.
We are reconsidering some of the graphics we use as content for our toolkits and social media presence. As a result, we have created our Know Your Power® Bystander toolkit images to be inclusive of multiple identities.
As we work from a social justice lens, we strive to be responsive to the experiences of individuals and communities with multiple identities by educating ourselves and using this new knowledge and skills to adapt our strategies to be truly inclusive so that everyone has a role in ending sexual and relationship violence and stalking.
By LB Klein, MSW MPA
LB Klein is Director of Trainer Development and a lead trainer for Soteria Solutions and a PhD candidate in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work.