Bystander rape-intervention programs on rise

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Training programs around the country are trying to teach bystanders to stop sexual assault, and now is when they have to be especially alert.

Campus sexual-assault reports are so common at the beginning of the fall semester, college administrators call this time of year the "red zone."

Penn State University sends campus-wide text alerts when someone has been sexually assaulted. During the last academic year, there were 29 campus text alerts about sexual assaults at the university's main campus, and half of them were issued in the first 10 weeks of school.

"Maybe that's why you showed up today," said Katie Tenny, as she ran a rape-prevention training session at the school earlier this year. "Maybe you're tired of the text alerts, knowing that this is happening to people around you."

Tenny is the leader of a program that seeks to teach people to do or say something to prevent a potential attack. It's one of the hundreds of bystander intervention programs that have sprung up in recent years at universities, high schools and military bases, designed to involve whole communities in discouraging harassment and sexual assault.

Momentum for this good-bystander movement has been building for several years, aided by some widely reported stories of heroic interventions. Though research is still evolving, studies so far suggest it is helping.

But now some assault victims and their advocates fear new obstacles, including a recent announcement by the U.S. Department of Education it would jettison rules that had pushed colleges and universities to be more aggressive about sexual assaults.

A bystander is present in about 30 percent of cases of rape, threat of rape or unwanted sexual contact, according to an Associated Press analysis of 24 years of data from the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey. In just over one third of those cases the actions of the bystanders helped, often by scaring off the assailant in some way.

That happened last summer in Gainesville, Florida, when two bouncers at a club, one a linebacker at the University of Florida named Cristian Garcia, intervened when they found a man raping a woman in an alley behind the bar. The 19-year-old woman was extremely intoxicated, but said she did not know the man and had tried to push him away. Christopher Lee Shaw, 34, later was convicted of sexual battery and sentenced to five years in prison.

Still, experts note many people may choose not to intervene in these situations.

In large national survey of students at more than two dozen U.S. college campuses in 2015, 20 percent said they'd seen someone acting in a sexually violent or harassing manner, but most of them said they did nothing. When asked why not, about a quarter said they didn't know what they could do.

A program called Green Dot, founded at the University of Kentucky about 10 years ago, teaches student leaders and others to identify potential sexual assaults and safely intervene to prevent them. The program has spread to hundreds of campuses, including Penn State, which calls its year-and-a-half-old Green Dot program "Stand for State."

Tenny says there are a number of sometimes simple things people can do, like starting a conversation with a potential victim, or getting a friend to intervene.

These programs seem to work, but evidence is limited so far, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some researchers say Green Dot programs' main impact may be to help women be more aware of risk and prepare more -- which is the same approach as the self-defense classes and rape whistles of 50 years ago, when responsibility for rape prevention was mainly put on the shoulders of potential victims.

"You're not addressing potential assailants. You're just saying; 'If you see something, say something,"' said Anna Voremberg, managing director of End Rape on Campus, a Washington, D.C.-based group.

The bystander-intervention movement took off during President Barack Obama's administration, which took several steps to address long-standing concerns sexual assaults were under-reported and poorly handled by police and prosecutors in many parts of the country.

Some advocates say the measures are the main reason on-campus sexual assault reports have been rising at Penn State and other colleges for several years. They don't think rapes are becoming more common, but that more victims have become willing to come forward and report them.

"For me, that's by far one of the biggest wins. People are trusting the system," said Samantha Skaller, a recent Syracuse University graduate who led a rape-prevention campaign there.