Upstander Intervention
What might change if I lived in a community full of upstanders?
How do we foster a culture of upstanding to reduce all harms in a culture that has the capacity to passively reflect or actively disrupt violence and oppression?
We invite you to participate in this training to create your answer to these questions. Request an upstander training here.
Preventing the Bystander Effect
The bystander effect is a phenomenon in which the increased presence of witnesses or "bystanders" during a crisis actually decreases the likelihood that someone will intervene. This is attributed to the assumption by most individuals that someone else will respond, thus justifying their hesitance or refusal to take action.
The key to bystander intervention is the recognition and acceptance that you might be the ONLY one that will act and you should take measures to intervene in the interests of helping someone else, while assessing and taking precautions to protect your own safety and well-being. There are many different ways to safely respond, including the 4 D’s of intervention:
- Direct: Check in
- Examples of helpful questions - Are you okay? How are you doing? What do you need? Would you like to go?
- Provide options, a listening ear, and make sure that they get home safely.
- Delegate: Tell another person who can help you intervene (friend, police, someone with authority, etc.).
- Distract: Interrupt the situation or redirect individuals that may be at risk.
- Delay: Check in with impacted parties after incident occurred and continue with follow up.
Upstander
An upstander is someone who witnesses a behavior that could lead to something high risk or harmful, and makes the choice to intervene to make things better. Every bystander faces the same choice: “Do I get involved and try to make things better? Or do I ignore the situation?”.
In the prevention of sexual and relationship violence, upstanders play a critical role. They are often the largest group of people involved - outnumbering both the perpetrators and the victims. Upstanders can have a range of involvement in assaults. A person or persons may be aware that a specific assault is happening or will happen, they may see an assault or potential assault in progress, or they may have knowledge that an assault has already occurred. Regardless of how close to the incident they are, upstanders have the power stop assaults and to get help for people who have been victimized.
We want to promote a culture of community accountability at Stanford where bystanders become upstanders that are actively engaged in the prevention of violence, realizing that we are all responsible for each other in addition to ourselves.
As a Upstander, what can I do?
As a Stanford community member and a global citizen, we invite you to reframe the critical role of the upstander as an individual that both intervenes in daily acts of harm (i.e. street harassment, bullying, sexist jokes) and periodic high-risk situations (i.e. situations that may lead to physical violence, sexual assault, relationship violence). When confronted with daily acts of harm, the upstander disrupts these harms by tuning in to self and others and intervening through the framework of privilege and oppression. In high risk situations where the harm is both immediate and threatens safety, the upstander acts using immediate methods of disruption that prioritize safety and time sensitivity.
To support you in doing this, we invite you to live the upstander life through the LIFE* model, which conceptualizes 4 steps to intervention:
Learn how to apply the LIFE model to situations that warrant intervention by requesting a training.
Have any further questions?
Contact the Grace Poon Ghaffari at gpoon1@stanford.edu.