Activating Our Campus 2017 Breakout Sessions View Other Sessions

We all want to be proactive bystanders, those who step up and into harmful and oppressive situations. We assume that with the 4 D's to bystander intervention (Direct, Distract, Delegate, and Delay) in our toolkits that nothing will stop us! But what do we do in those situations that still have us hesitating to step in? Our privilege, power, and oppression impact our comfort with and ability to intervene in all kinds of problematic situations. What identities do we have in common with the people involved? What identities are different? How does this help us or defer us from intervening? In this breakout session, we plan to unpack the role that identity and intersectionality plays in bystander intervention and work in collaboration to brainstorm ways we can address barriers to intervening.

This breakout session will provide people who facilitate workshops on their campuses with tools on how to navigate difficult and problematic conversations and questions that come up in sexual assault and social justice workshops. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss scenarios and practice and how to respond in order to still have a constructive conversation that stays on topic and guides the conversation back to the original point. This breakout session will discuss what this looks like for people of varying identities, how sexual assault affects them differently, and how allies can utilize this tool to lessen the emotional labor that people from more marginalized identities face, and make their services more inclusive and welcoming to people of diverse identities and backgrounds.

This breakout session will start out with some general statistics about sexual assault, such as how many Americans are sexually assaulted a year, the age range that is at the highest risk, etc. It will then move into the topic of the fetishization of women of color, starting with the definition of racial fetishization. We will discuss how this perpetuates stereotypes and then ask them about the stereotypes that they've heard or things that people have expected of them because of stereotypes. Then we'll talk about why it's not a compliment to be called exotic and examples of that. We will also talk about how this relates to sexual violence, how women of color are seen as hyper sexual. And I want to finish with discussing ways to combat this kind of behavior and rejecting it. This breakout session will be discussion based, and will involve group participation, so they can take what they learn and use it in their life and their experiences.

This highly interactive program sheds light on the power structures and societal attitudes enforced by everyday language that helps create a rape-accepting culture. Participants will help name this language, and work to address the harm, and what discuss what we can do to create change in order to be more inclusive in our every day This program will engage in attendees in recognizing harmful language and expectations that people of different identities face on a daily basis.