Imagine this scenario: You work in a store, and you overhear your boss instruct another employee to keep an eye on some customers who just came in because, according to the boss, “those kinds of people” steal. What do you do?
It’s a question that was raised as part of a training this week in Lewiston-Auburn on how to intervene safely in cases of public harassment or violence.
One participant at the training suggests a couple of options.
“Ask the employee to do something else with you, so another work task. Volunteer to do that in place of the employee, then don’t,” the participant says.
Participants are practicing quick, easy ways to respond when they see harassment or violence in their communities. There’s a need for this kind of bystander training in Lewiston and Auburn, says Jan Phillips, a member of a local group called Community of Kindness that formed last December, after she and others witnessed more incidences of harassment, particularly toward refugees and immigrants.
“We talked about it with other people, and they’d say, ‘I just didn’t know what to do!’ And we thought if we knew what to do, we could make our community even stronger,” she says.
Others in the community also noticed that seemingly small incidents were actually a growing problem.
“What we knew is that it was those of us who are the bystanders, mainly the white people in the community, that needed to intervene. That it was not fair to ask the victims to be the ones to intervene,” says Kathy Durgin-Leighton, executive director of the YWCA in Lewiston.
Community of Kindness partnered with the YWCA to bring the national organization Green Dot, etc. to Lewiston to train representatives from a broad range of organizations on how to make the leap from passive to active bystander.
It’s the first time Green Dot is focusing specifically on harassment. The nonprofit typically trains schools and organizations, including Bates College, to prevent sexual and domestic violence. But the general approach is the same.
During the kick-off, trainer Alberto Lorenzo displays a community map that’s scattered with red dots.
“Every time that a red dot gets on that map, it represents a moment in time. A choice that someone makes to harm another person. A choice someone makes to use his or her words or actions to intimidate another person,” he says.
Lorenzo explains that bystanders can also make choices in those moments. They can intervene to diffuse the situation and turn it into a so-called green dot. If enough people take individual action, the idea is it will create a larger cultural change that prevents these incidents.
“One thing we learn in America as immigrants is that collective voices matter in this country,” says Fowsia Musse, an outreach worker for Healthy Androscoggin.
Musse is doing the training because she says she has noticed increased Islamophobia since President Trump was elected.
“Silence is a problem. A lot of Americans don’t know how to react when incidences of racial and Islamophobia are taking place,” she says.
But reacting doesn’t have to be difficult, says Kristen Cloutier, president of the Lewiston City Council. She also works at Bates College and has done Green Dot workshops on campus.
“I think it allows people to speak up or make a statement about their values in ways that are less threatening than people might feel they would need to be,” she says.
Green Dot teaches that bystanders can intervene in three different ways: they can be direct, they can distract or they can delegate to someone who may be in a better position to take action. Cloutier says she put her previous trainings to use a couple weeks ago when she was grocery shopping and saw a new Mainer being harassed.
“Normally I probably wouldn’t have said anything because I was there with my child, and sometimes that can feel really intimidating because you don’t want to put yourself in harm’s way and you don’t want to put your family in harm’s way. But because I had the training, I sort of got in my head — what kind of example am I setting for my daughter if I don’t say something here?” she says.
Cloutier intervened, and she says the tension was defused. The goal of the training, organizers say, is that actions like Cloutier’s will become the norm, rather than the exception.
This story was originally published on Aug. 16, 2017 at 5:22 p.m. ET.
