Bystander Intervention: Making a Positive Impact on a Negative Situation (2024)

After the 2016 election, Dean Sandro Galea called an all-school assembly to discuss what this election and new presidency meant for our communities, our nation, and the field of public health. Many people in attendance spoke up and expressed a sense of fear and vulnerability. With this unease in the air, Dr. Craig Ross, a research assistant professor in the epidemiology department, and Elizabeth Henehan, a research analyst in the epidemiology department, spoke up and encouraged the school to come together as a community to support each other. “I have your back,” Ross said. Ross approached Dean Galea, who was very supportive of this idea, and the seeds for campus-wide bystander intervention trainings were planted.

Fast forward to Fall 2018 and all incoming students at BUSPH participated in bystander intervention training as a part of their required Leadership and Management course. Based on training provided byHollaback, an organization focused on ending public harassment, this training teaches students how to be active bystanders. It equips them with the tools to recognize a problematic situation and respond both intelligently and compassionately, without throwing anger back at anger.

The bystander intervention training at BUSPH centers on the idea that teaching people very basic skills to creatively deescalate situations of public harassment is beneficial to community health. These skills are known in this work as the 5 D’s: direct, delay, distract, document, and delegate. Direct means to step in and intervene directly, while delay means to check in with the person who was targeted after the fact. Distract means to take attention away from the situation, and document means to record events in case the targeted person would like to use them as evidence. Finally, delegate means to tell someone of a higher power, such as a store manager or a bus driver, about the situation so they will use their authority to intervene. A key component of this training is that it teaches students that they can be a hero in many ways. With a little creativity, kindness, and strategic thinking they can make a positive impact on a negative situation and have each other’s back.

“When you are taught a couple of key skills you can use, people are more likely to intervene in situations of harassment, and they are more likely to intervene in a way that is helpful,” says Henehan, who is working to train students at BUSPH.

The impacts of these trainings are not only seen across the BUMC campus, though. Through word-of-mouth, various organizations in the surrounding community have reached out to Ross and Henehan about bringing bystander intervention trainings to their organization. With the help of Greg Cohen from the Epidemiology Department, these trainings have expanded to organizations in the community, and Ross and his team are providing people with the tools to transform their communities. So far, nine trainings have taken place in the community with over 100 people trained in bystander intervention, and these numbers are growing. As more and more people are empowered by this training, they feel other people should have these tools available to them, as well.

“Part of my interest in expanding beyond BUSPH,” says Ross, “was that we should be giving our community an opportunity to go out in the broader world and represent what public health means and how it translates into action.”

Some of the community groups and religious institutions that have been trained in bystander intervention include the Wellesley Democratic Town Committee, Christ Lutheran Church in Natick, Temple Beth Shalom in Needham, Needham First Parish Church, and North Hill of Needham.

As interest in bystander intervention training continues to grow, as does the need to train faculty, staff, and students to conduct these trainings both on campus and in the community. A group of BUSPH students have gone through the training and are now both members of the training team and research assistants for Ross and Henehan, assisting in developing and adapting the trainings based on trainee feedback moving forward.

“A lot of what we discuss in the trainings is how our own identity can influence our perspectives on being a bystander,” says Caroline Ezekwesili, one of the students on the training team. “You have to be aware of yourself and understand how you orient yourself in public to successfully intervene as a bystander and do this work.”

“The general person just really doesn’t know what to do when situations of public harassment arise,” add Hithu Kodicherla and Maya Adler, who are also students on the training team. “Giving them the skills to help people in the moment will help to build more trusting, accountable communities that can focus on policing themselves rather than being policed by outside sources that may not always be welcome.”

Adler assisted in facilitating a training at Temple Beth Shalom in Needham earlier this semester.

Ross, Henehan, Cohen, Mahogany Price from Graduate Student Life and their team in-training have seen a lot of school-wide support for the work they are doing in bystander intervention and hope to continue to grow and expand their training program across the Boston University campus and beyond.

“It is encouraging that BUSPH is a community that cares about these issues,” says Henehan. “I think this speaks highly of BUSPH and its commitment to address social determinants of health. It signals clearly that this school intends to train dynamic leaders for the future of public health.”

For more information about the broader impacts of bystander intervention, please visit Hollaback’s website. For more information about the bystander intervention trainings on the BUMC campus, please visit our website.

— Mallory Bersi