Standing By

Being a bystander, in my mind, has always meant watching from the sidelines.   A bystander assumes a certain degree of passivity, standing outside of and separated from the action.

But when I flip that notion on its head, a bystander becomes one who is standing by.

Suddenly, I am central to the action and I am required to make a conscious choice about how and whom I want to be.

My perception first began to shift after attending a training on violence prevention.  The training was based on the work of Dorothy Edwards, and educator and counselor who realized that, in spite of the 30 plus years of attention that have been given to the prevention of violence against women, the numbers have not gone down.  Statistics like 1 in 3 and 1 in 6 give testimony to the fact that power based personal violence is still occurring at an alarmingly high rate.  It is Dorothy’s hypothesis that, bystander intervention can drastically reduce those numbers.

When I talk about power based personal violence, I am talking about any action, attitude or behavior that uses power and control to justify violence against another.  Domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, elder abuse and bullying are all forms of power based personal violence.

Most people would agree that none of those things is acceptable.  And, in the past, most people have decided that that agreement is enough.  Most men are not perpetrators and most women need to believe that they will never be the victims. 

And yet, here I am, getting ready to send my youngest daughter off to college and I hear statistics like, 1 in 3 women on college campuses will be raped!  That is not okay.  It is not okay for me to hand this problem off to my daughter and explain to her that this is what it means to be a woman in our society.  It is not okay for me to put all the responsibility on her to keep herself safe.  It is not okay, because it won’t work.  If it did, the statistics would be different.  If it did, self defense classes would be enough to protect us from violence. 

They aren’t and they don’t.

They don’t, in part, because we think of rape and abuse as the explosive event.  Intervening at that point is too scary for most of us, and rightfully so.  But what if we viewed abuse on a continuum?  What if we learn to recognize the moment we first become uncomfortable?  What if we become sensitive to the danger before it becomes dangerous, like an animal that raises her hackles when she first smells danger?  If we could do that, we could be amazingly effective standing by-ers. 

And the good news is, we can! Actively standing by can happen in the lives we are currently living.  No one needs to become a feminist or start working for a domestic violence organization or begin attending awareness events.  The only thing that needs to change is that we need to become conscious. 

You can’t ever un-hear numbers like 1 in 3 or 1 in 6.  It is up to each of us to intentionally decide whether or not we are going to choose to ignore those numbers. 

If you choose to ignore those numbers, I am going to ask you for a list of all of the people in your life.  Then I am going to ask you to circle the 1 in 3 or 1 in 6 whom you are willing sacrificing to violence. 

If you choose to say “no” to violence in your world, I am going to ask you to become an active bystander.

Actively standing by can mean that you stop laughing at oppressive jokes.  It can mean that you offer assistance to the harried mother who is yelling at her two toddlers because they have stretched her to her breaking point and are gleefully bouncing on her one last nerve.  It can be posting information about domestic violence services in your community on the bulletin board at work/school/church.  It can be making an agreement with your friends about how each of you plans to get home safely from a party.

Actively standing by means that each of us takes personal responsibility for making our community a safer place.  It means that we consciously move from six o’clock, where we are shaking our heads and ranting about the GD SOB’s who pollute our world with violence, towards three o’clock, where we join hands and stand together for peace and say “I see you.  I am here for you.  I am here with you. You matter.”