OPINION: USG’s sexual assault initiative marks the bare minimum

The Undergraduate Student Government unanimously passed a resolution on Feb. 19 to pilot the “Bringing in the Bystander” training on campus. The program seeks to prevent sexual misconduct by reaching out to campus organizations and educating third parties on how to approach different scenarios.

While founded with good intentions, this initiative appears to be little more than damage control. It scapegoats bystanders with an unreasonable burden — and more importantly, it is a cop-out. USG is doing the bare minimum to address sexual harassment and assault on campus, when it should be doing more proactive and necessary legwork.

Speaker Pro Tempore Matt Crane, co-chief diversity officer Shany Ebadi and two USG senators penned the resolution. Their first pilot training event took place on Feb. 23 and was attended by 40 student leaders, faculty and staff.

“We wanted to take a community-based approach to solve this problem and find out what our standards are as a community,” Crane said. “[The program] puts a lot of emphasis on talking through scenarios as a group, saying, ‘What should happen here?’”

The general premise of the solution alone contains logical fallacies. Sexual misconduct is in no way a result of bystander passivity. When a sexual assault incident occurs, bystanders are only a side product of being in a given place at a given time. Sometimes, they have the power to intervene, but not always, and they are certainly not the solution to sexual misconduct. Rather than faulting the perpetrators of these crimes, this resolution absolves them and places the fault on those who happen to be near the incident.

Often, victims do not realize they are in a dangerous situation until it is too late. Given the nuances of these situations, it is unrealistic to expect uninvolved third parties to correctly judge a situation and the intentions of other individuals, much less intervene.

The resolution places an irrational level of responsibility on the bystander, which oversimplifies the complexity of approaching sexual misconduct encounters.  

The resolution itself, while incomplete and inefficient, is by no means a negative initiative. Likening bystanders to watchdogs is fair. Expecting bystanders to speak out if and when they see someone who needs help is fair.However, this resolution was passed in the context of the administration’s own lack of effort — and that speaks volumes.

“Especially now, we have seen little effort from administration,” said Jillian Halperin, one of the USG senators who penned the resolution.

This is not hard to imagine. Over the past few years, the student body has watched the University try — and fail — to sweep alleged scandals under the rug to save face: once with Keck School of Medicine’s former dean Carmen Puliafito, and again with former campus gynecologist George Tyndall, who is now at the center of LAPD’s largest alleged sex abuse investigation. It does not come as much of a surprise that the administration would rather protect its reputation than proactively address a controversial issue.

USG is openly facing pushback from the administration on these matters, and they are sitting down on such pushback. They are pushing forward a temporary solution to a long-term problem. Labeling bystanders as “key players” in preventing sexual assault is like putting a band-aid over a bullet-hole: It offers the illusion that something is getting done, when in fact no progress is being made.

It is USG’s job to fight for students, especially in the face of the administration’s self-serving motives. The truth, though, is that it is more convenient for USG to present the image of both proactivity and bureaucratic harmony. Its leaders want to appear as if they are tackling sexual misconduct on campus while maintaining good relations with administration. These individuals want the best of both worlds, but they have become pushovers because of it.

As the organization unequivocally closest to the student body, USG should not keep such a safe distance from campus assault issues. They need to take the pushback and fight harder, actively opposing the precedent the administration has set on sexual misconduct. They represent every single student who sets foot on this campus, and this student body is too smart and too frustrated for complacency and pandering. Acquiescing to administrators is exactly how trust in well-meaning organizations is eroded and ultimately lost.