Show Notes

Dax Valdes is a senior trainer at Hollaback.

The 5 D's of BYSTANDER INTERVENTION TRAINING

GET TRAINED IN BYSTANDER INTERVENTION by Hollaback in collaboration with ASIAN AMERICANS ADVANCING JUSTICE.

New York police have arrested a man who viciously attacked a 65-year-old Filipino woman near Times Square as she was walking to church on Monday

To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST

TRANSCRIPT:

ZAK: Today's episode contains graphic and disturbing descriptions of a recent hate-crime that was caught on video. I'm not gonna play a video but you will hear me listen to it. If you want to see it, I linked to it in our show notes. And if you don't want to see it or hear the descriptions, skip this episode.

AMY GOODMAN, DEMOCRACY NOW excerpt:

ZAK: (Watching recent attack on 65 year-old woman in NYC). Oh my God. Oh my God.

AMY GOODMAN, DEMOCRACY NOW excerpt: New York police have arrested a man who viciously attacked a 65-year-old Filipino woman near Times Square...

ZAK: That's one of the things that makes this video even more disturbing. But it's to watch these guys, apparently, they're security guards, literally close the door on this woman. I don't know what could have been done. The attacker is really violent. Really fast. But, depending on the situation. Depending on how physically violent it is, there are several things we can do as bystanders.

DAX: Hollaback is an organization that was founded in 2005 by a group of friends and there mission is to end harassment in all its forms so they started this as a blog post and they were collecting stories of harassment and they read those stories and they started to notice that the only thing good thing that ever happened to people who experienced harassment was when somebody intervened on their behalf to help them out.

ZAK: All week on the show, we're gonna learn the 5 D's of bystander intervention from Hollaback.

DAX: Distract. Delegage. Document Delay. Direct.

ZAK: Five actionable steps that we can take to help out the person who's being harassed.

DAX: Not necessarily dealing with the person doing the harassing but taking care of the person in conflict. At the start of quarantine last year, there was an uptick in reported crimes towards Asian-Americans and a lot of these incidents go unreported for any number of reason.

ZAK: But a lot of these incidents are reported. The group Stop AAPI hate just put out a report where they counted 3800 incidents of Anti-Asian harassment since March of last year. Most of these attacks aren't physically violent. 70% are acts of verbal abuse and harassment. Alright, so what can we do? When we talk bystander intervention training, the first to think about, says Dax...

DAX: You gotta just trust yourself. If you feel comfortable stepping in. Great. You should do it. And it's always a judgement call and it's always a brave thing to do. If you're seeing something that's erupting into physical violence, you have to prioritize your safety. But if it's something like...

ZAK: You see two people on the sidewalk and they don't appear to know each other. And one of them is verbally attacking the other. What do you do?

DAX: You can drop something. Accidentally spill your drink in-front of somebody. Oh, I'm so sorry.

ZAK: Distract.

DAX: If you see somebody in conflict, you could walk up to them and say, I'm sorry I'm late. Who's this? Well, we gotta go. Thanks. Even if you don't know them. Or, don't I know you from somewhere or could you give me directions. If you're starting a conversation with the person who's in conflict, you don't have to talk about refer to what you just saw or what's going on with the person who's doing the harassing. Just keep it cool. Talk about something unrelated and hopefully the person who is doing the harassing is starved of attention and they exit the scene. It might not always work that way but you're doing that, other people are seeing this and thinking, oh, yeah. That's something I can do.

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