The Graduate Student Society (GSS) has modified UBC’s active witnessing training to create a new active bystander program, designed to cater more towards specific graduate student situations and use a peer-to-peer model.
Both the active witnessing and the active bystander program have similar goals and aim to empower students to respond to discriminatory and hurtful language and behaviour that they may witness in their everyday lives. They will both also help students understand the social elements that perpetuate sexual assault and give graduate students the tools to take action where action is needed.
UBC’s active witnessing program is offered through collaboration with the Sexual Assault Support Centre (SASC) and the rest of the sexual assault prevention team. The program will be provided to student leaders and resident advisors. This active witnessing program was then changed for graduate student situations and modified to be more peer-to-peer based and called the active bystander program.
UBC’s active witnessing program, and thereby the GSS’s, is heavily based on UBC associate professor Dr. Ishu Ishiyama’s research.
“A lot of the research suggests that active witnessing and bystander training can be really effective in informing campus communities of the role of being an active witness to sexual assault and really look into intervening in cases where it might occur,” said Ashley Bentley, the manager of SASC.
An initiative known as “My Grad Story” gave the GSS a better understanding of the situations and potential issues that graduate students specifically face. Using this insight, they partnered with SASC and other facilitators of UBC’s active witnessing program to create a program that they felt would be most relevant to the graduate student experience.
“I think graduate students differ [from undergraduate students] because there is just so much more isolation,” said Gen Cruz, president of the GSS. “A lot of our graduate students are also from all over the world. It’s really a range of people from different stages of their lives coming together to go to grad school and that leads to many different situations.”
It was also decided that instead of hiring staff from outside of UBC’s graduate student population, 13 graduate students would be trained to facilitate the active bystander program.
"What the research tells us is that when it comes to doing training around sexual assault, that a peer-to-peer model is often more effective," said Bentley.
These initial facilitators will first train GSS executives and councillors. The program is also designed to be eventually become available to the wider graduate student community. In the long-term, Cruz hopes it will even become a mandatory part of orientation.
“We did the first phase of it, which was to train our facilitators, and then we’re going to have an assessment of the last workshop that was done and we’re going to see from there where we can go — our goal is to have it available for affiliated organizations,” said Cruz.
In the end, it is hoped that what these programs will do is change campus culture.
“It’s one of the many ways that we can address sexual assault and it’s a huge problem in North American universities,” said Cruz. “It’s really about changing the conversation.”
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