Franklin & Marshall College

Location

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Situation

The Director of Student Wellness, Education and Violence Prevention at Franklin & Marshall College, Kathryn Wanner, was familiar with the evidence-based Bringing in the Bystander® program and recommended the program be incorporated into the college’s sexual violence prevention efforts.

Franklin & Marshall is excited to have Bringing in the Bystander® as part of its prevention initiatives, because in the past students have expressed frustration with not knowing what to do when they spot a potentially concerning situation. As Kathryn Wanner explains, “At Franklin & Marshall, we are expanding the understanding of who should be a part of these conversations to be effective and to achieve real sustainable change. Conversations about violence prevention have to include all of us. This is not just about the victim and the perpetrator. We are providing the students with concrete skills they can use on campus and in the community.”

The Soteria Solutions

Bringing in the Bystander® – The College Prevention Program

Due to the large commitment of various stakeholders across the Franklin & Marshall campus and community, Soteria Solutions’ Casey Laplante and the Director of Student Wellness, Education and Violence Prevention, Kathryn Wanner, planned a virtual facilitators’ training to launch Bringing in the Bystander (BITB) at Franklin & Marshall.

More than 30 staff, students and community partners attended the two day train the trainer program led by Soteria Solutions’ subject matter experts on bystander research and Bringing in the Bystander (BITB) program.

Franklin & Marshall has established a broad base of stakeholders in their effort to create and maintain a safe and respectful living and learning community. Participants in the training included several coaches of athletic teams, a Public Safety Officer, Peer Health Educators, students, Student Violence Prevention Coordinators and community partners including the Women’s Resource Center and multiple YWCAs.

The Bringing in the Bystander training materials were customized to include Franklin & Marshalls data on sexual assault. To help the participants understand the prevalence of unreported sexual assaults on campus, Casey worked with Kathryn to present their community’s statistics in ways that students could easily visualize and recognize within their surrounding campus.

Training a large team of facilitators enabled F&M to prepare for an ambitious rollout and implementation of the BITB program, with trained students and staff supporting each other and co-facilitating, which makes everyone more comfortable. By hosting a single organization event, staff can customize the curriculum to their audience and increase success in their prevention efforts. The virtual training was conducted in February 2021 to then launch the roll out of Bringing in the Bystander on campus.

Implementing Bringing in the Bystander

The pandemic presented challenges to the rollout as students were largely attending class virtually and social activities were limited in the Spring semester of 2021. With a more normal college atmosphere in the Fall semester, Bringing in the Bystander was rolled out in phases with the goal of having all House Assistants (HA’s is F&M’s term for resident assistants) and many Greek life chapters trained by the end of the semester. The next priority group for training is the student groups and athletics, prioritizing those responsible for the majority of social activities on campus.

F&M has incorporated bystander-related questions into its student survey and gathers input from the students as they roll out the BITB program. Early results indicate the students particularly appreciate the relevance of the scenarios to help them learn bystander intervention skills.