Breaking a Script, Building a Culture
by Anna McNeil, BR ’20, and Jordan Powell, MY ’21
Before Deborah Ramirez, PC ’87, publicly announced her allegations of sexual misconduct against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ES ’87, LAW ’90, she reached out to a former classmate, James Roche, MC ’87. Did Roche remember her mentioning that “something bad had happened to her during a night of drinking,” their freshman year? Roche didn’t recall any such conversation — in an interview with The New York Times, he attributed this, in part, to Ramirez’s faded memory, “clouded by that night’s alcohol use.”
The alleged incident took place in Lawrance Hall on Old Campus. Many students were present and even now recall witnessing misconduct. Ramirez told The New Yorker that she was disappointed by the inaction of her male classmates, who witnessed Kavanaugh expose his penis in front of Ramirez’s face, and did nothing.
“They’re accountable for not stopping this,” she said.
In the fall of their sophomore year, every Yale undergraduate is required to attend a session of Bystander Intervention Training, a means of “Breaking the Script of Sexual Violence.” The training is offered by Yale’s Community and Consent Educators (CCEs) and directed by Melanie Boyd, SY ’90, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs.
The workshop begins with a screening of Who Are You, an eight-minute video that follows an intoxicated woman during her night out. She is taken home by an unnamed man, identified only as “the Stranger.” Brief shots of the woman lying unresponsive across the bed and “the Stranger” undressing above her cut abruptly to a plain door. A voice breaks the four minute soundtrack: “Sexual assaults are happening to young women and men, and one more is too many.”
The second half of the video rewinds to its beginning, slowing down to focus on each interaction the woman has with other characters throughout the night. This time, they intervene. From the scenes featuring “the Bartender” to “the Roommate,” the film’s takeaway is that any individual has the power to disrupt a dangerous situation.
Though the video depicts one specific scenario, it points out the many instances throughout the night when various bystanders could have intervened. For some students, this generally positive tone is empowering: the workshop equips students with the social tools they need to identify and interrupt sexual misconduct.
But others still found the session’s overall messaging inefficient and indirect, and left feeling that the workshop was uninformative at best, and misleading at worst. “I feel like I really didn’t learn anything in terms of new strategies,” remarks Valentina Connell, TD ’20. “I feel like whatever bystander intervention strategies we talked about, I already [knew]. I had used those bystander intervention strategies from day one of Yale. And [I] had friends use those strategies on me.” For those students who have felt at risk from day one, and who have already developed defensive strategies accordingly, “Breaking the Script” is too little, too late.
Methods of intervention commonly used among students center around the idea of offering people outs. Coral Ortiz, ES ’21, and her friends have a “go-to signal, or statement.” “I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh do you want to go to Moon Rocks?’” Ortiz laughs. “No one goes to Moon Rocks. So that’s a way of being like, ‘Get me out of the situation,’ or [asking] ‘Do you want to leave?’” “[I] often ask someone if they want to get fresh air,” adds Elaine Lou, DC ’19. For many, intervention and discretion go hand in hand.
Though many students routinely perform bystander intervention at Yale, many also express anxiety about initiating intervention. First-years, who have not yet gone through the CCE training, could be particularly uncertain bystanders without the tools provided by CCEs. “I think there’s always hesitation [to intervene],” explains FroCo Sara Speller, DC ’19, “especially when they’re first-years here, because everyone is so afraid about making friends.” Social unease will often incapacitate students, especially younger students who have not yet formed reliable support networks. Still, Speller encourages her first-years to “check in” casually, telling them “[to] make sure you’re still looking out for each other.” With regards to anxiety on the part of the bystander, Speller insists, “I believe, as a FroCo but also as a friend, that it is better to be safe than sorry.”
“My first year, it was hard to find a way of navigating social spaces. I felt like I was more vulnerable… it was hard to find a way out,” remarks Ortiz. A year later, she feels more empowered to intervene, and to ask others for help when faced with a potentially harmful situation. “I feel like Yale is more my space than I did last year. So I’m more comfortable outright being like, ‘This isn’t cool.’”
The social challenges of intervening are twofold: difficulty in distinguishing between consensual behavior and misconduct, and in determining what intervention tactics to use. “It’s difficult navigating,” Edwina Kisana, ES ’16, a former FroCo explains. “Am I projecting my thoughts or fears or concerns onto this person, or are they really in trouble?” Kisana elaborates, “I think the hardest step is trying to figure out whether it’s your place to intervene. I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck.”
Bystander Intervention Training attempts to confront and overturn the social norm that conflates intervention with trespassing, with the crossing of an invisible line between a stranger’s private life and one’s own. The workshop suggests that people are more likely to intervene if they can do it subtly, a view iterated on the CCE website: “We focus on low-level techniques and approaches that include enlisting the help of others, because we know that people will intervene earlier and more often if they can keep the stakes low and casually offer someone an easy way out rather than explicitly interrupting an encounter.”
The “Breaking the Script” pamphlet mentions “sexual pressure, unwanted attention, or disrespect,” excessive drunkenness, and “worried looks” as signs to look out for. However, following this detection, the next step offered by the supporting materials is not so clear. The next step, titled, “Should someone intervene?” offers students two cues: “Is the situation heading in a bad direction?” and “Does someone need help?” Following the second question, the pamphlet suggests that students “follow their instincts.” If the best advice that Bystander Intervention Training offers is for students to follow their instincts, why was it necessary in the first place?
In the immediate context of party culture, “deciding” when and how to act is not always easy — even if students are generally aware of the importance and demonstration of consent in sexual encounters. Incoming FroCo Ry Walker, SY ’20, is optimistic about the legibility of consent among students. But she wonders if the training gives students the proper tools to use this understanding to intervene in party contexts. Walker explains that, while the CCEs in her workshop “gave accurate information, it was hard to see how [the training] was applicable to an actual college student’s life.”
Who Are You transpires in two locations: a bar, and the victim’s home. But social spaces proliferate on college campuses as individuals find their niche throughout their four years. Interventions at Woads, versus a frat party, off-campus home, or suite, all have the potential to look as different from each other as those captured in the video. Bystander Intervention Training suffers from a dearth of imagination.
The mismatch between representation and real life, according to Walker, stems from the environments presented by popular social spaces at Yale, which are different from the one shown in the video. Walker believes that “there’s just a lot of uncertainty” in typical college party spaces, like large off-campus fraternity parties, in contrast to the workshop’s focus. “The examples that [the workshop] gave were very clear about how someone is acting and how to intervene,” she remarked. But usually this clarity is lacking.
Intoxication can muddle social meaning. Connell remarked that the role of alcohol in Who Are You was interpreted differently among her peers who attended the workshop. “I’ve heard people also say that [the video] seems like it’s putting blame on the victim for being too drunk,” she mentioned, though that wasn’t her impression. Johnny Gross, MC ’21, in his own approach to bystander intervention, recalled a potential aggressor whom he identified as such because “he seemed very aggressive and drunk and I was worried that something bad could happen in terms of sexual assault.” To bystanders, severe intoxication can flag someone as a potential victim or a potential aggressor. Though a red-flag for intervention, intoxication also makes intervention difficult in spaces where drunkenness is the norm.
In this way, intoxication is woven into the complicity that blankets certain spaces. Walker recalls that relatively minor forms of assault are so normalized in certain spaces — frats, in her experience — that intervention rarely occurs. “I know there have been so many nights where I … or other people around me have been grabbed and not consented to it,” she says. This rampant sexual misconduct engenders “a lack of a feeling like it’s the wrong thing because it’s just the norm,” Walker points out about herself and her peers, especially during her first semester at Yale. “But,” she insisted, “that doesn’t mean that it’s right.”
Confronting this norm begins with more successful and sustained examples of speaking out. But this can be hard, too. It is unsurprising that students often feel more empowered to intervene in spaces where they feel comfortable. Branson Rideaux, ES ’20, says, “There are some spaces in which I feel very unempowered as the bystander. And it has to do with my uncomfortability in the space.”
Successfully challenging a toxic normative culture, therefore, seems contingent on creating more spaces where individuals feel comfortable enough to intervene. Elaine Lou, DC ’19, member of Miss/Chief, a non-binary and womxn of color DJ collective, explains some of the ways in which the group seeks to make their party spaces more inclusive. “When I’m not on the decks, I’m just eagle eye, making sure that people are having fun,” Lou remarks.
Miss/Chief sets clear rules about party behavior on its Facebook event descriptions. We say “no racism, no skeevy behavior, none of that. Keep that out the door. We always do that,” Lou says, in comparing this explicit precedent of behavior set by Miss/Chief to a typical campus-affiliated event. “It’s pretty much a standard at New York and Brooklyn parties… That’s not something I see being implemented at Yale in the near future.”
Rideaux expresses similar frustration as Lou regarding a Yale-specific culture: “There’s a sense of anonymity; people don’t really feel responsible for each other and to each other… That doesn’t really exist, I don’t think.”
In October 2018, the CCE program expanded to include a new mandatory Title IX training for juniors and seniors. In contrast to the single workshop offered for first-years and sophomores, juniors and seniors may choose from a variety of options from “Community Values and Accountability,” “Disrupting Disrespect: Advanced Bystander Intervention,” and “Making the Party: Hosting Skills for Creating a Safe, Welcoming Space,” to name a few.
What the CCE program doesn’t do, despite this increased variety, is question the structure of responsibility that these workshops imply. Miranda Coombe, SY ’21, says the workshops “feel like giant Band-Aid.” In focusing on risk management strategies, the trainings fail to directly confront sexual assault. “When they ask where the responsibility lies in these situations — where you’re somewhere with your friend and you see that someone is making your friend uncomfortable… the responsibility is supposedly with you to intervene in the situation,” she says. “That just completely ignores the real cause of the problem: sexual assault. It’s tricky because I understand where CCEs are going with that — to try to make the community more proactive — but they don’t really question any of the underlying causes of actions or the spaces in which [assault] often occurs.”
Furthermore, intervention may be met with varying degrees of credence or praise depending on the gender of the bystander. “Usually when men intervene,” Coombe observes, “they’re taken far more seriously.” Coombe juxtaposes these more socially recognized interventions with the extensive, but covert “whisper networks” commonly associated with female friend groups. “It’s often female friends who look out for their other female friends.” Bystander Intervention Training is a misdirection of responsibilities: once more, women disproportionately pick up the mantle for keeping their friends safe.
By way of alternatives, other students suggest that Yale College mandate additional, multi-installation training. Gross suggests that a consistent, semester-long course could be a more useful way to ensure the traning’s message reaches all students. “I thought [Breaking the Script] was positive, but [it’s] possible people slept through it.” He imagines “a mandatory, consistent class that you take Credit/D/Fail, [where] just showing up and not sleeping through it would be enough to pass.”
But beyond training expansions, how can students hold each other to high enough standards of respect and mutual care? On a peer-to-peer level, Rideaux offers a place to start: “You have a lot of control over what you do and what your friends do, and the conversations that your friends have.” Rideaux stresses the importance of “making sure that your friends are not only aware of, but are actively talking about [sexual assault and sexual harassment].” Connell also suggests that “cultural shifts” can be as minor as “lowering the stakes of checking in with someone after they’ve had an encounter, and [asking], ‘How did that feel for you?’”
On a larger scale, a cultural shift might require extending bystander interventions beyond the immediate circumstances of an assault. Attitudes and behavior surrounding misconduct need to be confronted elsewhere in order for the culture to change. Helen Price, DC ’18, who founded Students Against Sexual Misconduct at Yale (SASMA) — formerly Unite Against Sexual Assault Yale (USAY) — believes bystander intervention is only the first step of many to improve Yale campus culture.
Price remarks, “Bystander intervention, as a concept, should be extended to include calling people out for messed-up comments and jokes they make — since things like that, which might seem insignificant, actually lay the groundwork for the normalization of sexual disrespect.” Speller echoes this sentiment, noting that as a FroCo, she’s already seen the positive attitudinal effects of discussing the importance of bystander intervention. “There have been moments where somebody has told me a story and it turns into a conversation about making sure that they and the people around them are listening and respecting [each other].”
“Breaking the Script” limits the relevance of bystander intervention to an immediate social context, where the stated standards and procedures for intervention are routinely difficult to apply. The workshop fails to address the reality of Yale students by inadequately addressing numerous student arenas that nuance the way this script is written, performed, and inscribed. Intervention is not an event; it’s not a physical action or even an attitude. It occurs before and after the fact; it’s a culture in and of itself.
