How to break the bystander effect

Uncategorized

Jun. 10

What would you do?

Welcome! This newsletter is in podcast mode 🎧 Follow At The End Of the Day with Hannah Sung on your fave podcast app or scroll to bottom for all the links. And keep reading for what I believe is one of the most important topics I’ve ever published.

Hello from my desk! And happy Friday. I am so excited to bring you this week’s podcast episode, which features bystander intervention training—the life-changing tools you didn’t know you needed.

Be prepared

Think back to the last time you witnessed a harmful act in public. Maybe you saw a man yell racist words at a teenage girl on the streetcar. Or like me, you came upon an a bloody fight very early in the morning while jogging. Whatever it was that happened, it could have been at the mall, in your classroom or online, in a Twitter spat.

What did you do?

Julie Lalonde is an Ottawa-based educator and women’s rights advocate who has been teaching bystander intervention training for over 10 years. I spoke with her for my newsletter last fall and what she taught was so life-changing that I needed to bring her back for a podcast episode.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by At The End Of The Day (@at_the_eod)

What makes a safe community?

Every week I write, I’m reminded that community is the key to so many social problems. Loneliness is harming our health1. And last week, I mentioned Ontario’s lowest voter turn-out ever. Well, what makes a person use the political levers available to them if they don’t feel a sense of belonging and community in the first place?

And then there is fear. We are experiencing a sad and scary sharp increase in racist hate crimes2 and gender-based violence3. As Julie pointed out to me last fall, these complex social issues won’t be solved by information alone. We need tools to address them.

Julie teaches the 5D’s of bystander intervention. They’re simple to remember but you have to know how to use them. Once you do, knowing these tools can help you act during those unexpected moments.

And I believe it’s those small, everyday actions that build a safer community, not buying a home in a specific neighbourhood or installing a security guard or increasing a police budget. A safer community isn’t *waves arms around* a thing out there to find on a quest.

A safer community is in our daily interactions with other people. And we can practice them every day.

Julie blasts the myth that bystanders don’t care, that people want to keep moving with their day or that they simply don’t want to get involved. The truth is, we are people with empathy. People do intervene. But effective interventions might not fit your mental image of what it means to be a superhero who defuses a heightened situation and that’s okay because we should focus on what works.

Have a listen to this episode and let me know what you think by giving it a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.

Big thanks to Julie for doing the work that she does. It’s life-giving and important and useful.

If you find this information useful, please forward this letter to a friend.

Happy weekend listening!

Hannah

✨✨✨At The End Of the Day is edited by Laura Hensley and the podcast is produced by Olivia Trono with additional producing this week by Frances Kim ✨✨✨