Bystander intervention is a hot topic at campus orientation sessions this fall as colleges struggle to come up with new ways to prevent sexual assaults. But the University of Texas system is taking that idea much further by urging students to step in to try to stave off suicide, binge drinking, hazing, hate speech, and even offensive language and academic dishonesty.
Texas regents allocated $1.4 million last year to support the three-year bystander-intervention initiative across the system’s eight academic campuses. Each campus is developing its own targeted interventions, which it will share with the others.
All define bystander intervention as “recognizing a potentially harmful situation or interaction and choosing to respond in a way that could positively influence the outcome.” All prescribe the same three steps: Recognize the harm, choose to respond, and take action.
“We want to change the culture to one where we look out for each other and don’t stand by watching things happen,” says Chris Brownson, associate vice president for student affairs at the system’s flagship campus, in Austin.
“This is an umbrella initiative to infuse all of our programs with one common language and one common set of action steps,” says Mr. Brownson, who is leading the project for the system.
The flagship campus’s program, BeVocal, distributes its messages through social media, posters, student plays, and presentations. Laminated flip cards in campus centers give step-by-step guidelines on how to recognize and respond to a variety of troubling scenarios, from a student who’s passed out, drunk, to one who’s making a joke about rape.
Training bystanders to step in has been the focus of recent violence-prevention efforts on campuses nationwide, including the University of New Hampshire, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Carnegie Mellon University, where students can play an interactive game presented in the form of a graphic novel.
The student-run Green Team at Dartmouth College is taking on excessive drinking and sexual assault by watching out for students at fraternity parties.
Such programs have enjoyed renewed attention since the White House’s It’s On Us effort put the spotlight on them.
Few programs tackle as many issues as Texas is taking on. One that takes a similar, sweeping approach is Indiana University at Bloomington’s Culture of Care, a student-led, staff-supported initiative that encourages students to watch out for one another, whether the problem is sexual misconduct, drug abuse, or depression.
Freshman and Greek-life orientations at the University of Texas at Tyler included scenarios in which actors exhibited a number of troubling behaviors that could easily be overlooked in the chaotic and stressful first semester away from home.
Using the three-step approach of recognizing the harm, choosing to respond, and taking action, the students discussed how they might step in.
“It could be something like they stopped going to class or stopped interacting with other people and didn’t want to come out of their room,” says Kim Harvey-Livingston, director of student services. “They might be sleeping all the time or not sleeping.”
If someone says, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I’m done,” that could mean anything from the person is homesick to sick of his class or contemplating suicide, she says.
Confronted with such a statement, a roommate might mention that a lot of people who are sad or depressed have thoughts of hurting themselves and ask whether he had ever thought about that.
He could then hand the student the numbers for campus counseling services.
Actions might be direct, like asking a potentially suicidal person if she’s considering hurting herself, or indirect, like calling the campus police or a crisis-response team.
“Whether it’s about violence or depression or suicide or alcohol,” Ms. Harvey-Livingston says, “this is about recognizing that there’s a problem and choosing to act.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
