Students, faculty, staff and community partners have united to develop and promote bystander intervention to prevent sexual violence at Elon, with students offered the opportunity to lead campus conversations.
A partnership of Elon students, faculty, staff and community partners has launched iACT, a bystander intervention seeking to creating a campus free of sexual violence
iACT is an innovation aimed at creating campus change through the implementation of a bystander approach to prevent sexaul assault at Elon. The initiative merged from a community engagement project Kacie Lynch, Ilana Fitzpatrick and other students conducted when taking the HSS 213 Working with Groups & Communities course in fall 2015.
Carmen Monico, assistant professor of human service studies, taught HSS 213 and the project was developed in partnership with h CrossRoads Sexual Assault Response & Resource Center. Lynch and Fitzpatrick have worked over the past two years with Becca Bishopric Patterson, assistant director of the Gender and LGBTQIA Center, to propose integrating conversations about bystander intervention to prevent sexual violence into the first-year student experience.
During the first six to 10 weeks of classes, a period known as the Red Zone, iACT recruited 21 students to participate in a series of three two-hour training sessions to become workshop facilitators. Trained students are able to lead conversations with first-year students who assume an active role in preventing sexual assault during the Red Zone and thoughout their four year experience at Elon.
The training workshops seek to help first-year students improve their knowledge and confidence in intervening safely around language, behaviors and actions that contribute to sexual violence. The 30- to 35-minute discussions with first-year students are being held at residential neighborhoods and 100 level courses across the university starting in October.
Please contact Patterson (bbishopric@elon.edu), Lynch (klynch21@elon.edu) or Fitzpatrick (ifitzpatrick@elon.edu) to learn more about this initiative and to schedule facilitated discussions of the bystander program in your classrooms.