Abuse:Training bystanders "not to stand idly by the blood of another person"

We have repeated reported incidents of abuse, identified perpetrators and enablers and we have spent many hours discussing  the halacha and hashkofic issues. We have also wondered why people aren't doing something about the problem.

The most obvious answer for inactivity is that bystanders really don't know how to respond i.e., what is the appropriate things to do when  witnessing or hearing about abuse.  In fact this reluctance for bystanders to intervene is known in psychology as the Bystander Effect. This concept was used to explain a report of a woman who was brutally attacked for 30 minutes and then murdered while 38 neighbors were watching from the windows - and they were said to have done nothing.

Psychologists concluded that to the degree a person feels that it is his personal responsibility to do something he will act. If it can be rationalized that someone else should or will take care of it - people become very passive. It is also important that the bystander know what to do.

Bystanders realistically worry about themselves regarding the embarrassment, the halacha of mesira and lashon harah, the concern for lawsuits, possible retaliation, loss of job etc etc. It really is easier just to look away and pretend you didn't see or hear something.

[update clarification to concern's comment] In our community there is already support for an accused molester. 1) proclaim he was innocent 2) claim that anyone who said otherwise was a moser in short - it was a reactionary position of do nothing against an accused perpetrator and allow nothing to be done. the alleged perpetrator is always protected. The guilt or innocence is not the question for them - it is that there is a high wall to prevent action to be taken against an accused molester and they reinforced that wall

What I am proposing is to focus on protecting the victim. At the present the issue of arvus and tochacha don't get involved because the molester is never guilty. The focus on protecting the accused molester has a much stronger base in society than those who want to help the victim. The potential protectors of the victim are the bystanders to the crime.

I think it is time to institute a program in our communities to teach two things. 1) There is an individual responsibility to act to protect others. 2) How to effectively intervene when someone witnesses not only sexual abuse but bullying of any time. The following describes one such program used in universities which trains bystanders how to intervene to stop and report abuse.

Those who are interested in organizing such a program please contact me

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Yale University   All sophomores will be required to complete a 75-minute bystander intervention training as part of an ongoing effort to improve the campus sexual climate, according to a Wednesday email to the class of 2015 from Yale College Dean Mary Miller and Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd ’90.

Over 90 workshop sessions on strategies for preventing sexual misconduct as a third party will be held from Jan. 31 to Feb. 3. The program will be run in small groups of 14 or 15 students, and each group will be led by student communication and consent educators in an effort to establish a conversational setting, Boyd said. The curriculum of the training consists of a video showing a hypothetically harmful scenario, an overview of the ideas behind bystander intervention and group discussions about applicable situations.

“This is a fairly new area in sexual violence prevention,” Boyd told the News. “Preliminary research at other universities is showing that bystander intervention training can produce dramatic drops of sexual violence on campus, as well as improving the climate overall.”

In contrast to traditional prevention programs that target potential victims or perpetrators, bystander intervention will teach students methods to respond to instances of sexual misconduct as third-party community members, Boyd said. Sexual assault tends to unfold through fairly standardized two-person interactions, according to studies, but the introduction of a third party quickly disrupts the original power dynamic and can prevent potential sexual misconduct, Boyd said. The program aims to encourage students’ tendencies to intervene in harmful situations and to shift the broader mindset of the campus community, rather than emphasizing the promotion of new content, she added.

The entire sophomore class will be trained because bystander intervention is most effective at a community level, Boyd said. Training of sophomores will round out existing workshops given to freshmen, which educate them about the dynamics of sexual pressure, and leadership training workshops geared toward juniors and seniors. The added sophomore workshops are part of an effort to structure the University’s sexual awareness programs more effectively, with bystander trainings a “middle ground” between the existing approaches for students in other classes. [...]