Jennie Brooks, host of the Unstoppable Together podcast, sits down with Executive Director of Right To Be, Emily May. Addressing the alarming rise in harassment and violence directed at marginalized communities across the country, they discuss what you can do to help if you encounter harassment as a bystander. Emily shares some of Right To Be’s proven de-escalation tactics as well as its “5D model” for safely assessing a situation and effectively intervening.
Jennie Brooks:
Welcome to Booz Allen Hamilton's Unstoppable Together Podcast, a series of stories that unite us and empower each of us to change the world. I'm Jennie Brooks with Booz Allen Hamilton, and I'm passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Please join me in conversation with the diverse group of thought leaders to explore what makes them and all of us unstoppable.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Unstoppable Together Podcast. I'm your host, Jennie Brooks, and I'm inspired today to be joined by Emily May, co-founder and executive director of Hollaback, a non-profit, global, people-powered movement to end harassment in all its forms.
Emily, welcome to the podcast.
Emily May:
Thanks so much for having me.
Jennie Brooks:
Thanks for joining us. Could we start by having you tell us a little bit about Hollaback, how it came to be and how you're responding to things that we're observing today, particularly the increasing violence that we're experiencing across our communities?
Emily May:
Yeah. Thank you for that. I started Hollaback with just six friends about 15 years ago, and it started really in response to my own experiences of harassment, street harassment, gender-based harassment in public space. It felt like, everywhere I go, everywhere I went, somebody had something to say about what I looked like or my body or what they wanted to do with me. It was exhausting, and I felt like I had no options, and so, as friends, we started talking about this and we were like, what if we just shared our stories to make people aware of the extent to which this happens?
For the first five years, it was just that simple. It was this little blog. But this little blog hit a nerve, and so many other people came forward and shared their stories and, of course, that has evolved and today, we've collected 15,000 stories of harassment. Through just that act of listening to this stories, reading the stories, we learned a few things about harassment. One is that it happens to almost everybody in some way, shape or form, but that the folks who are disproportionately targeted by it are women. They are people of color. They are LGBTQ folks.
The other thing that was really hopeful was that we learned that, when people intervened, it did make a difference. So we started doing bystander intervention trainings back in 2011. Of course, it was crickets then. People were like, what? Harassment is not even a problem. Why is bystander intervention a solution? You don't even have a problem, and nobody came, but we had them anyway. It just evolved from there and, along the way, we started to look around and say, this issue of street harassment is one issue among many. We started to look over at online harassment, workplace harassment, and say, can we apply some of this stuff in these other areas? and we did, and it worked.
Last year, we partnered with Asian Americans Advancing Justice. We saw the rise in anti-Asian, anti-Asian American harassment in the wake of the coronavirus. That took off. We launched a whole training series in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to address anti-Black harassment, police brutality, those took off. So our goal is to be an allying organization, to be a perpetual affront to harassment in all of its forms and to be able to be of service in these moments.
Jennie Brooks:
Awesome. Awesome. Let's talk a little bit about the detail behind that. In bystander intervention, you cover the 5D Model for assessing how and where to help someone being harassed. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Emily May:
Bystander intervention broadly is not about heroics. It's not about seizing the day. It's just about showing up and helping somebody out in their moment of need. We do bystander intervention, and we put on a mask before we leave our house. We do bystander intervention we help somebody with the door. When it comes to harassment, we freeze. We don't know what to do. So Hollaback's, 5Ds of bystander intervention are just simply designed to help us overcome that, to get back to our core natural human desire to take care of other humans in need.
The 5Ds are, and I'll briefly go through them just so you have a sense of what they are, the first one is distract, so creating a distraction to deescalate the situation. It could be by dropping something, your phone, your water, some coins. It could also be just starting a conversation with the person experiencing the harassment as a way of building that safe space with them. Delegate, finding somebody else to help. My favorite person to delegate to is the person next to me. I think they want to help, but maybe they haven't been trained yet. We have document, creating documentation of the harassment. We've seen a lot of this used to expose human rights abuses. The number one trick to document is to give that footage the person experiencing the harassment because that's what bystander intervention is about. It's about giving them the power to decide what they want to do with this, what happens next? Maybe it's sending it to the local news media. Maybe it's showing it to their boss to explain why they relate to work. Whatever it is, it's their choice.
Jennie Brooks:
You're giving it to the person experiencing the harassment?
Emily May:
Yes. Yes, and that's counterintuitive. We've seen so many-
Jennie Brooks:
It's counterintuitive. Right.
Emily May:
Yeah. We've seen so many human rights abuses exposed using our cell phone cameras, harassment, violence, obviously human rights abuses. But bystander intervention is about prioritizing that person being harassed, prioritizing that person in the moment. Having your trauma blown all across the news, blown all across social media without your consent, it's even further disempowering. We want to give them that power back.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay. I understand. If I can go back to delegate, what's an example of a go-to line for delegation?
Emily May:
What I like to do is get a buddy, like, hey, do you see what's going on over there? Start that conversation. it doesn't look like she's okay. Should we go and do something Would you be willing to say something. I don't feel comfortable. I'm worried it's going to turn on me. Or, I'm going to go ahead and start up a conversation with her. Can you do me a favor and go and get a store manager? Or, I'm going to create a distraction. Can you document this just so that she has footage if she does decide to report it in the future? Those types of things, those little actions, I find people are really willing to step into it. They just don't know what to do. Even if you decide to directly intervene, certainly, the form of bystander intervention entails the most safety risk, knowing that you've got this other person with you even if they're a stranger is going to help to support your safety and the safety of the person being harassed.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay. Got it, and then what are the other two Ds?
Emily May:
The fourth one is delay. That's just to check in. We know from our work with Cornell University, as little as a knowing glance can we reduce trauma when it comes to harassment. But, what we also know is that so often people don't do it. The moment passes. They freeze. They don't do anything, and they're like, eek. What we hear from reading all these stories is that people feel more traumatized by nobody saying anything to them, nobody showing up and taking care of them. Oftentimes, they do by the original incident. They can understand there's one bad actor out there in the world being foolish, but to understand there's a whole room full of people watching it and nobody showing up into it is a whole nother ball of wax.
Then the last one is direct intervention. We all think about direct intervention, the movies model direct intervention all the time, but to really deploy it as a deescalation tactic. What we want you to do is to set the boundary with the person doing the harassing. She's not interested. Give her some space. He told you he's from Michigan, let it go, whatever it is. And then we want you to turn your attention to the person being harassed. Don't escalate it. Don't get in the back-and-forth. It's going to be very tempting. They're likely to turn around and say, what are you saying? I was just asking where he was from. It's not a free country? You can't tell a girl she has a nice dress, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't want to get in that back and forth, because then what happens is that the first time being harass now not only has one escalated person with them, they've got two escalated people on their hands and still nobody really taking care of them in that moment. So we want to deescalate the conflict, de-emphasize the engagement of this person doing the harassing, and really prioritize and care for the person being harassed.
Jennie Brooks:
I love that This gives us a range of options to draw from in the moment. Are these the same Ds that you would recommend parents talk with their teenagers about? Regardless of age, it's age appropriate for teenagers who might be experiencing flavors of bullying?
Emily May:
It is. It absolutely is. I think we've really failed kids by talking about bullying as some sort of benign thing that's not grounded and racism and sexism and homophobia. It's just like [inaudible 00:09:38]-
Jennie Brooks:
Message that everyone experiences. So somehow that makes it acceptable.
Emily May:
Yeah. And by not talking about the root causes at play there, the five Ds work with, I would say really all ages. And so we're partnering now with folks to talk about the five Ds in elementary school, middle school environments. We've done this training even with middle school students. And look, we asked the principals, we said, do you have any worries about the kids using these things and it going sideways? And they were like, no, absolutely not. Because the kids are already intervening, but they're intervening in ways that aren't safe. And everything that we teach them is about prioritizing their own safety so they can make smarter decisions on how they do it.
So we actually have in a partnership with L'Oreal Paris, capacity to train any high school in this country in bystander intervention completely for free. So if your listeners have some folks in high schools out there, give me a call, reach out to us on our website. We're happy to roll up and train the entire school for free.
Jennie Brooks:
That's awesome. Thanks Emily. Your team also offers another training on conflict deescalation. What does that look like? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Emily May:
Yeah. So conflict deescalation is a little bit of a different thing. Lots of folks who feel like they might be direct interveners geared towards conflict deescalation, but it's actually the folks who are more those delay people that check in after the harassment happens that are really great at conflict deescalation. Because it's the same as bystander intervention, you're not trying to get in this back and forth. You're truly trying to deescalate conflict. And you really only want to implement these strategies and situations where it does appear to be escalating into violence. Because our approach is observe, breathe, connect. The approach is to watch for those signs of escalation into violence, to take a moment to ground yourself, to be fully present, stable with it, and then to connect with this person.
Now, it's really hard. It's like booter level work to connect with somebody who is actively hateful, actively racist, actively sexist, actively doesn't think you are fully a human, but you do it not in the spirit of giving them free therapy or making a new friend. So you do it in the spirit of deescalate the conflict so that the people around you can ultimately be safer. So, it's definitely a trickier approach. I think it's not for everyone, whereas I would say anybody can do bystander intervention. It's definitely a certain personality type that goes in for conflict deescalation. But favorite fact about conflict deescalation. Did you know that the New York City police department is not trained on conflict deescalation? Wouldn't that solve a lot of problems that we've got going on?
I don't know about other police departments, but I'm going to guess if it's not happening in super progressive New York, it's probably not happening in Texas or Omaha either. It's such an important skill set for folks in those positions like security guards, police officers, even folks on the front lines and cashiers and retail stores to have this in their back pocket.
Jennie Brooks:
Awesome. So you've been through quite the journey, starting with six girlfriends talking about the comments that the cat calls on the street to deescalation strategies with potentially violent scenario. What are some of the insights and lessons learned you've gained along the way with Hollaback?
Emily May:
Oh gosh, it has been quite a journey. I think that a lot of what we have learned is that people want to support other people, that they don't know how. We've also increasingly learned that people want to set up what we believe is kind of a false binary between people who harass and people who experience harassment. I think there is certainly a degree to which some people are harassed more than others. People of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ folks are of course experiencing more harassment and the more of those identities that you're holding, the more likely you are to experience harassment. But we also know that everyone creates harm on some level. We all have been hurt. We all have caused hurt. And so part of that long haul work that we're doing is to complicate this narrative a little bit, but we're not being like, oh, they're the harassers. Let's lock them up and put them away, and these are the poor victims.
Instead, we really want to say, look like we're all standing in our full humanity here, and we've all screwed up. So let's really see our work with people who do harass others as hopefully transforming that behavior. Not canceling them, but working with them to transform that behavior, to see that behavior, to want to change that behavior. And similarly, let's not put people who experience a lot of harassment in a box either, right? They're not victims. They are people who are surviving what is really hard stuff, and they're coming out stronger and more empathetic for it. This is not the entirety of our identities. These are things that we just kind of go through. So a lot of what we want people to do is to see the ways that they've experienced harm, to see the ways they've caused harm, and to see the ways that they can show up into harm as well. And I think that work is still very much unfolding at this time, but I see a lot of hope. I'm seeing a lot of seeds of change.
Jennie Brooks:
For those listening who want to be part of that journey moving forward, you've armed them now with some tools in the moment, but for the long haul, for our collective future, how can they get involved? How can they learn more, perhaps take a training? What would you recommend?
Emily May:
Yeah, so come to our website, ihollaback.org. In addition to being able to roll up to your favorite high school or college and train the entire thing for free, we also provide public trainings for free. So we have a public bystander intervention to address anti-Asian harassment. We have bystander intervention to address anti-Black harassment, police brutality, to address street harassment. We also do conflict de-escalation, implicit bias. So training is not the single solution, we need a complicated solution. But ultimately the only thing we have full control over is ourselves. So making sure that we are doing the work to show up in alignment with our values, and we see harassment. That we're doing the work to shine up, show up in our full values when we do those moments of disrespect or those accidental microaggressions, that we know how to see that, that we know how to apologize for that.
Of course, doing the unfortunate work of really having to process the trauma of harassment and build resilience so that it doesn't chip away at who we are. It all is work. At Hollaback we really have note that it's not just one community who's being targeted, it's community after community after community. And so we really want to show up as a perpetual affront to harassment in all of its forms. So you can also donate on the website to really deepen your engagement and deepen our ability to show up into this work and make sure at the very least, we've got individuals there. And that as individuals change, so will society.
Jennie Brooks:
Wow. Well, I'm so inspired by your work. I wish we didn't have a demand for your work. I look forward to the day when we can say we hollered back and now we're talking about something different together. But until that day comes for every podcast, we allow our guests some final free space on the episode. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we go today?
Emily May:
Yeah, I think it's that we can't feel hopeless in light of all this violence that we're seeing. We can't feel like there's nothing that can be done or there's nothing that we can dom because there always is. And whether it's getting trained in bystander intervention or getting trained in implicit bias to address the way that you are showing up in your workplaces, those little things make big differences, particularly for people experiencing a lot of this harassment and for folks who are authentically scared right now, for their kids, for their family members, their parents. We have to realize that we can show up into this, that we can affect change. And that if we change everything around us, changes too. We don't just have to wait for the government to decide that it's time or corporations to decide that it's time, we get to decide that.
I think if I leave your folks with one thing, it's just to decide. To do one little thing today and another little thing tomorrow and another little thing the next day. We're not responsible for doing everything, but we're all responsible for doing something.
Jennie Brooks:
Thank you, Emily.
Speaker 3:
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