Community is the strategy Guest: Emily May

IE-In this program, my guest is Emily May from Right to be.

Hello and welcome to the fifth season of We Can Find a Way. My name is Idil Elveris. This is a podcast about conflict resolution. And thanks to you listeners, by 2023, I have already made it to season five. Five. I'm going to repeat it. Season five. Of course, I have to thank to all guests who have agreed to appear here, and to those persons who have, financially and through their contribution in marketing, translation and the use of their materials, supported me otherwise, I'm eternally grateful. Also, because only 33% of all podcasts end up producing more than ten episodes. So the fact that I'm getting close to 70 is really amazing. I cannot thank you enough.

In the first episode of the year, I'm talking to another amazing person, Emily May who, at the age of 24, co-founded Right to Be. This is an NGO that was established in 2005 in the United States to focus on street harassment. They initially collected stories of harassment, but over time, they decided to design a bystander intervention program. So the bystander intervention program teaches certain tactics for people that want to help the person who's being harassed, basically. So through these tactics, we, the people or society in general, have become agents of change, signaling to men mostly that this type of behavior is not okay. The tactics of the Bystander intervention program are called the five Ds: Delay, Document, Distract, Direct and Delegate.

These days, people in London are seeing in public transportation posters that ask what they would do if they witnessed this type of situation. And if you then follow the government link to a website, you will see that these policies look quite familiar to these five D’s, stressing the person to act safely. So, before I turn to our interview where we discuss all this, let me introduce Emily to you. Emily May is an international leader in the movement to end harassment. And has won eleven awards for her work. She was featured in more than 200 news media outlets, including The People, the New York Times, and NPR. She holds a bachelor's from New York University and a master's from the London School of Economics. Now, let me turn to our interview, and Emily has a huge announcement at the end of the interview, so please listen to the podcast until the very end.

All right, Emily, thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. So please tell me, why did you come up with this bystander intervention trainings that your organization is doing?

EM: I co-founded Right to Be, then called Hollaback! when I was 24 years old. And we always collected stories of harassment. But around 2011, we started really mapping stories of harassment, and it almost looked like a disease epidemic. You know, there were just these dots and dots and dots and more dots of harassment everywhere. And it was frankly really depressing to look at, like, all right, is there anything related to harassment that is good? Like, is there anything positive that happens? After reading all the stories, it was clear that the one positive thing that would happen is when somebody would show up and support you, even if it was something small, like, say, “are you okay?” It meant a lot to the person being harassed. And so we thought, okay, let's look into this, and learned there's a whole field around this called Bystander Intervention. At the time, it was largely deployed to address sexual assault on college campuses, and we partnered with an organization called Green Dot to scale it to look at issues of harassment. And it's taken off since then.

IE: It was basically a desire to do something about it rather than just take notes of an epidemic, as you have stated, because I guess you were getting frustrated about not being able to respond. That would be like giving people hope or showing them some tactics, I'm assuming.

EM: We were asked over and over again, what do I do when I'm harassed? And everybody wants this, like, perfect response. Well, if you say this, they'll stop and understand the gravity of their words. If you contact these people or report it to these people, right? I really resisted that because I felt like, look like you didn't ask to be harassed. It's not your responsibility to have some kind of perfect response to it. And at the same time, the people who are responsible for doing this, who need to change their behavior, the people who harass others, very challenging to get them into a room and say, okay, y'all, it's time to learn the impact of what you're doing. And so, we just found Bystander Intervention to be that perfect medium of really acknowledging it's on all of us as a society to address this issue. That the issue in and of itself as a cultural issue, not the culture of any individual person, but it's part of a culture of sexism and culture of racism and a culture of homophobia that is, quite frankly, everybody's culture and everybody's responsibility to address. Right? This harassment is just one of the manifestations of that larger culture. And if you look at how culture changes, it's because a bunch of people get together and decide to do a thing that could be like, we're all going to wear bell bottoms now, or whatever it is. But it can also be like, we're all going going to start intervening when we see harassment happening. And that's really where you start to see changes when people as a whole decide, no, this isn't something that we're going to deal with anymore. This isn't the price you pay for being a woman or being gay. This is what we want. We want to feel safe. We want to feel cared for in the world. When you say perfect response, it makes me almost like, laugh. Because there is no such thing, right? I mean, I do something with this perpetrator, it will generate a regret, and I do the same thing with another one. It's going to enrage that person. You can never know.

IE: So you're trying to shift the burden while trying to empower a victim. Well, we don't want to call her or him a victim, but we also want to generate a societal response, obviously, if I understand you correctly. But tell us about these de-escalation tactics. Because it's not only some of the tools that you're using are not only about “are you okay”. Or “what you did is not okay”. But intervention in a very discreet way, almost looking like it's not an intervention, but it's a mistake kind of. Why are you not escalating if you want change?

EM: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think what we have learned through training people and bystander intervention is, first of all, some of us, like myself, are just kind of conflicted. First, we're not comfortable marching up into a situation and being like, that's racist, and you're an asshole, but some of us are, and that's great too. The other piece of it is that most people who are going to intervene tend to share some sort of identities with the person being harassed. That's not to say everyone, but it is to say most people. And that is partially because they naturally empathize with the situation, but it's also partially because they really understand what it looks like. It's hard to know what exactly harassment looks like when it's happening to an identity that you don't share, unless you're, of course, attending a lot of our trainings, in which case we'll teach you. But so when you're thinking about, okay, they're sharing some of these identities or maybe they have other marginalized identities, it puts them at greater risk that the harassment is going to turn on to them. And so we really wanted de-escalation tactics that felt approachable that anybody could be like, “oh, I could do that” but that also kept the people intervening safe. Because if they're at risk, it's not going to help the situation at all. It just deepens the harm.

IE: It's also very interesting in the sense that you also don't expect when you relay that complaint to somebody, you don't really know how they're going to be responding, so it's safer to arrange your reaction. For instance, I was followed just like in your trainings by someone. So I turned back and I said to him: “why are you whistling?” And then I realized this was in front of a hotel. So I wrote a letter to the hotel manager saying, this person is working at your place, so please do something. And the next thing I know, the woman fires him. And I'm like, I didn't want him to be fired. I just want to sit with him and talk to him. Or I wanted you to tell him, but she was very adamant. She just looked at the cameras. She saw me turning and talking to him and saying, why are you whistling after me? Etcetera. And I felt really bad because I really didn't want it to be that way. But then she was like, “well, this is tourism industry. A person who whistles after a beautiful woman cannot work in this industry”. So I was like, okay, but he's not going to do it to a customer. How do you know? And so it was like, I almost felt guilty for saying it. So when I saw these 5 D’s, there is something for everyone without also not really harming the perpetrators.

EM: I think that's such an important point that you're raising because I think there can be a response that's too harsh, like somebody losing their job, when really they just need a conversation.

IE: Exactly.

EM: A lot of people, a lot of governments are increasingly endorsing the criminalization harassment and public space. And that's something that we as an organization don't endorse, not only because we don't think it's an effective deterrent, but also because those types of policies tend to be disproportionately deployed against minorities of color, black folks especially. That's because we live in a world that thinks that particularly black men are hypersexual, running around after the women, and they're totally unsafe. And these are myths upon myths upon myths. And we can't dismantle all the myths, but we can certainly do the work to not step into strategies that are going to increase the harm. And that's where we are. It's like, look, I want to be held in my full humanity. When I walk down the street, I want to feel safe. But look, even though you're kind of scaring me right now because you're saying those things to me on the street, I want you to be held in your full humanity too. I don't want you dragged off to jail and locked up to not see your kids for weeks or months or years or whatever because you made a mistake. I want somebody to have a conversation with you, and I want you to know that this is not okay. And I want you to see signs on the subway telling you this isn't okay. I think that's part of really where we are and what we do is that we're not looking at criminalization as a strategy. We're really looking at community as the strategy. And if you look at how all forms of violence have ever been addressed there's multi, multi year studies on the most effective ways to address violence. And it's always communities coming together, that's the most effective way. It's not about the law or penalization. It's all about communities setting the norm that that's what they want. And so that's what bystander intervention is. It's a set of tools that are as old as time, right, that people have always been deploying and just kind of package them and name them the 5 Ds as a bystander intervention and entertaining people how to do it so that they have it easily in their back pocket.

IE: Yeah. And any particular of these five Ds that you really like? And why do you like that one most?

EM: When we started, my favorite one was “delay” because a lot of the harassment that I saw, delay is just simply, “are you okay? How can I support you right now? Do you want me to walk you where you're going?” It's really only effective after the harassment is over. While the harassment is ongoing, you need to pick a different strategy. But I loved it because a lot of the harassment I saw in New York City, it was quick, it wasn't ongoing. And then I didn't know what to do or what to say. I didn't know how to be enough. And in some ways, delay just teaches you that just being there and checking in on the person is enough, is empowering. It is. And we have research from Cornell University that shows as little as a knowing glance can reduce trauma for people being harassed. However, there's also a high risk of screwing it up. You see harassment happening, you look the other way, that actually makes the harassment far more traumatizing for the person than if nobody saw it at all. So I love delay.

I'll say the crowd favorite overall is “distract” because there's lots of creativity in distract. So it could be dropping your coffee cup or your phone if you have a very nice case on it, or some change in your pocket, right? And people will scramble and help you pick it up or move aside because they don't want to get wet and there's that type of distraction. Excuse me. This is the research finding, like in reply to your questionnaires or something. This is what we saw people doing when they were seeking to stop harassment. These are some of the tactics that we saw people doing. The other way to distract is just to start a conversation with the person being harassed about something benign like, “I love your jacket, where'd you get it?” Or “hey, can you give me directions to such and such? So and so?” The idea is to build that rapport with them and to pull them slowly out of the situation with that strategy and that's “distract”. Right? And I think that's the crowd favorite because you get a lot of folks being like, “oh, I can drop my coffee cup. I can start a conversation with anybody about their outfit”.

IE: Is there a gender difference or any other differences among people? What sis the women's preferred way? Did you do a study or anything to have that kind of observation?

EM: We don't have data showing who prefers what and and why. I think broadly the trends that I'm seeing is that people who feel safer in a situation are going to be more likely to do something like “direct” which is where you're very clearly setting a boundary “that's not okay, don't talk to her like that”. And then you are turning your attention to the person being harassed. And, you know, and I will say as I started this work when I was 24, I'm 41 now. As I've gotten older, I feel safer in situations, right? And I feel more comfortable being like, “alright, back it up, that's not okay” than I did when I was 24 years old. So that sense of safety is going to change from situation to situation. It's also going to change with age as well.

IE: Yeah. And how are you cooperating with the rest of the world? I'm saying this because I saw something very similar employed by the UK government in the subway, I think it was like two months ago. And when I clicked on the tactics that they were recommending, I just thought they were very close to your five Ds. There were only four though, which is fine because the logic was there. So I'm very curious about how you are spreading this in English otherwise, please tell us more.

EM: We are very well aware of that campaign and spoke to them prior to launch. We are also talking to public transit systems in Italy. We've been working with New York City for a long time. So I think there is a tremendous amount of power in public transit in particular, taking this issue on broadly. We have been spreading this work globally by training local nonprofits in countries around the world to be able to retain the trainer program, to be able to deploy this methodology in their country and in their communities. And we are lucky to really have L'Oreal Paris being a huge sponsor of this work, to bring this work to scale. You know, they're the world's largest makeup brand. They took this on because they wanted to take on the issue that impacted women the most. And they did research. What is it? Is it pay equity? Is it harassment? Is that childcare? And across the ten leading countries that they researched, they found consistently it was sexual harassment that was showing up as the number one issue impacting women. And so that to me is huge. That this is the number one issue impacting women and yet there's relatively little resources out there to address it. But also that's something that's changing. The idea that Loreal Paris is taking this on is huge win that I couldn't have even imagined. Well, I did imagine when I was 24, but I was unsuccessful in pitching it to any makeup company. I did try and now these governments reaching out and wanting to figure this out too. And I think for a long time people really felt hopeless when it came to harassment, period. Particularly harassment in public space. People really felt like the only time harassment mattered was if it was sexual harassment in the workplace. But even that was new. That's that was like the 80’s and 90’s the sort of made that revelation, before that harassment didn't matter. Ever.

IE: And so it wasn't even accepted that it was happening. You were just being blamed for being oversensitive, hypersensitive, female.

EM: Don't you like the compliment? Stick and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me, right? Like blah, blah, blah, blah. And so now we see all these governments jumping into action and I think people were really hopeless about it. For a long time. I think people thought there wasn't anything that you could really do. Bystander intervention gives people a little bit of hope because it's something all of us can do. We don't have to depend on anybody doing it for us. We can all do it. We just have to be aware when we walk down the street and go to the grocery store and go to work and play online, right? Like, we have to be aware of what we're seeing and seek to take care of people, which is a natural human reaction and desire.

IE: And I think it's sharing the responsibility of doing something on us, not only putting it on the shoulders of the government or law enforcement, but also sharing it, as you have said, with the community so that everybody can participate. And it's not only like a criminal message. I guess that's where also the value is. Speaking of law enforcement, what are they thinking about these things? Like, have you given any training to police officers or did you get any input from them?

EM: Largely we've done bystander intervention training with them, but also a lot around just sensitivity. The response that we're getting from police officers is broadly “bystander intervention is great, we love it like you do. We want communities taking care of each other too”. But the reality and this is where we hesitate when we talk about delegate, right, finding somebody else to help. We really hesitate telling people to contact the police. We always tell them, check in with a person being harassed first before you contact the police. And that's because in our work collecting stories, we find that about half the time when people contact the police, the police will actually make it worse by being really dismissive. And half the time they can be helpful. There's a risk, right, that you can deepen the trauma. There's also a long history of police doing the harassment, right? There's a risk that can be made worse in that particular way. And of course, communities of color, immigrant communities, trans communities, all tend to feel a lot less safer on the police. I think it's a complicated relationship when it comes to law enforcement. I absolutely think they, like every other person on the planet, have a role to play. But people have this gut reaction like, oh, let's call the police. Police will fix it. And I'm like, data is not showing that the police are the right folks to fix it. Data is showing that we're the right people to fix it.

IE: Yeah. When you said they don't need punishment, they need a conversation. Are you interested in having victim offender mediation kind of thing, or any restorative justice ideas that you're exploring in the future?

EM: Yeah, it's a great question. I love all the work that's happening around restorative justice, and I think that there is a lot of unexplored space to be creative in how that can be applied to harassment. And I hope that we do that and that we're able to step into that work in the future. It's tactically very challenging, especially when you're talking about public harassment. It is so quick, it is so passing. You don't know who the person is to have that depth process, because the short addresses tend to be a relatively heavy process that requires building a container where both people can really feel safe. And so that's tricky. Thematically there's a bunch of area for us to explore in here. And one of the things that we think a lot about is that there's a tendency to think about, “oh, well, there's the people who get harassed and there's the people who harass”, right? And you're either somebody who gets harassed or you're somebody who harasses. What we see and what we believe is that all of us have created harm in our life at some point. All of us have a moment that's like, maybe she goes for the sort of justice process about that. That isn't actually how I wanted to show up in that situation. All of us have experienced harm at some point. Now, I will frame this out very clearly by saying some of us are harming others more and some of us are being harmed more than others. And there's a lot of identity factors that bleed into that as well as just how people decide to show up into the world. It's important that we blur the lines between the victim-perpetrator person. It allows us to see each other more fully. It allows us to see the person who's harming us and being like, “I wonder what's under that?” Right? And it allows us to hope, to see it more complicated. I think that's when some of the healing starts to happen is that when we stop just missing or writing each other off as just like, well, they just harass. That's just who they are. That's what they're about. And not think about this in a binary manner because that's not the only quality or the only thing that you have done in life. You view it in its complexity. When we started I was 24 years old. I was like super bold, walking up to dudes who would harass me on the street. They say the nastiest stuff to me. And at the time, we were doing a lot of photographing of our incidents of harassment to really show people that it happened because nobody believed us. And so I walked after this guy and I was like, “why did you say that to me?” And he was like, blah, blah, blah, because you're hot. I was like, okay, I'm going to take your picture. And he goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, lady. Like, I have kids. I'm a good guy. At the time, I was like, whoa. But then, why are you out here treating me like crap if you're such a good guy. In reality, it's probably true. Like, there is part of him that's a good guy. He probably does have kids, you know, like, he's not all like, you know, the scum of the earth just because he boldly was a jerk. In this moment, I think everybody wants to be seen as good person.

IE: Any ideas from masculinity studies? Because we know this has also to do with patriarchy and masculinity. Anything you can say about that? Are you working with men or sexuality studies?

EM: We do work with a lot of men. I think there's a lot of men who really want to ally on the issue of sexual harassment. There's also a lot of men, especially men of color, LGBTQ men, who are experiencing a lot of harassment and whose experiences of harassment aren't fully seen as valid because they're a man. Like, how could you get harassed if you're a man? And shouldn't you just be tougher than to experience harm because you were harassed? Right. I think there's a puffing up. Puffing up, exactly. Harassment is something that happened to women. And I think there's something there that really deserves exploration, because part of, I think, the resistance for men to more deeply address sexual harassment is that a lot of that not all, but a lot of them are getting harassed in their own ways, in ways that aren't being taken seriously by society, in ways that are super under explored. We talk about the ways in which black men are murdered by the police, but we very rarely talk about the ways in which black men can't go to the drugstore without being followed. This is the kind of work that I think we need to do. I think we really need to address these issues more complexly and realize that there's lots of ways in which we're hurting and there's lots of ways in which we need to figure out and take care of each other.

IE: Thank you very much for this wonderful interview, Emily.

EM: Thank you so much for having me. And for any folks out there who really wants to get trained in bystander intervention. We train hundreds of thousands of people in bystander intervention. Absolutely for free. So go to our website@righttobe.org and sign up for a free training.

IE: And it's online. I have taken part in it.

EM: Exactly. We're training from wherever you are.

IE: In this program my guest was Emily May from ‘The Right to Be’. Emily explained how they came up with the bystander intervention trainings to fight against street harassment. We discussed with her some of the tactics in trainings to understand why they were preferred by some, including the escalation, which is very important in conflict resolution. She also told me how they were cooperating with the rest of the world, but also combating not just street harassment, but harassment in all of its forms. Take the training if this is of interest. I did it almost a year ago and it was great. With that, I'm slowly coming to the end of this program. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please follow the podcast, like, or share it. I'm also working on the website of the podcast, so please follow the website of the podcast. You can also like the excerpts I share in my YouTube channel or in the Instagram account of ‘We can find a way’. As always, I would like to close by thanking musician Imre Hadi and artist Zeren Goktan who allowed me to use their music and picture in the podcast. Thank you and see you next month.