USG adopts bystander training

The Undergraduate Student Government Senate voted unanimously in a meeting on Tuesday to pass a resolution administering the Bringing in the Bystander training program on campus. The first pilot training event, which will be attended by 40 student leaders, faculty and staff participants, will take place on Saturday.

The resolution was penned by Speaker Pro Tempore Matt Crane, Co-Chief Diversity Officer Shany Ebadi and USG Senators Diviya Gupta and Jillian Halperin. According to Crane, the resolution was drafted following conversations with Director of Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives at Price School of Public Policy Lavonna Lewis, Office of Equity and Diversity Executive Director Gretchen Means and several other leaders on campus.

“In the wake of all the scandals and sexual assault and harassment that USC has had, we wanted to take a community-based approach to solve this problem and find out what our standards are as a community,” Crane said.

According to the resolution, 59.9 percent of female undergraduates and 52.8 percent of male undergraduates said they witnessed someone drunk heading for a sexual encounter. Of those who reported being a bystander to these interactions, 75.7 percent of bystanders made no attempt to intervene.

“What the statistics show is that we don’t have the standards we should [have], and we don’t have the education that we should [have],” Crane said. “And that’s what this is supposed to do. It’s to start the conversation with administrators.”

According to Gupta, the authors of the resolution split up outreach to recognized student organizations on campus to support the implementation of bystander intervention training. The resolution is officially supported by 54 organizations on campus, including Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention and Services, Interfraternity Council, Panhellenic Council and Residential Housing Association.

“We reached out to as many organizations as we could between the three of us, and given our time frame, the ones who showed the most support or were most eager to support the resolution, they were able to get featured [on the resolution],” Gupta said.

The first training event on Saturday is part of a semester-long pilot program launched with Bringing in the Bystander. The training will only be attended by 15 student leaders and 25 faculty and staff members, but in the future, representatives from more student organizations will attend the training sessions, Halperin said.

“Ideally, it’s one person from each registered student organization to implement and effect the most change on campus,” Halperin said.

At the meeting, Crane presented his vision for the future of the training program. The resolution will continue for the incoming Senate in the 2019-20 academic year, followed by a trial period through the 2020-21 academic year before it is fully incorporated as an annual requirement in the following year.

“Especially now, we have seen little effort from administration,” Halperin said. “This is a great partnership that we can use to combat the campus climate and the issues of sexual assault and harassment, and we think that students are eager and want to make that change.”

The training program’s curriculum, Crane said, will focus on appropriate responses to situations and proper protocol for bystander intervention.

“They have a lot of conversations about appropriate situations and how healthy relationships should proceed,” Crane said. “They put a lot of emphasis on scenarios, and talking through scenarios as a group, saying like, ‘What should happen here? What do we at USC think about this? How should this proceed in a way, when to intervene and how to intervene?’”

In addition to passing the resolution, the Senate voted unanimously to hire sophomore Mikkie Salud, who has had experience as a funding delegate at USG, as the philanthropy fund assistant director.