Sexual Violence prevention means that a situation is stopped before it escalates to sexual violence. Often, society views preventing sexual violence as actions that a potential victim can take to protect themselves. We instead want to shift to actions that our community can take to prevent a perpetrator from committing violence in the first place. At Georgia Tech, we take a community approach to preventing sexual violence, rather than targeting individuals as potential victims or perpetrators. This means challenging a culture that allows sexual violence to continue in our campus community. We believe that everyone has a responsibility to look out for each other, support each other, and hold each other accountable for their actions. Bystander intervention is one way to achieve this. 

Often when people think of bystanders, they think of the bystander effect - the phenomenon where the more people who witness a potentially harmful or dangerous situation, the less likely any individual is to intervene. The continued safety of our community requires all of us to commit to being pro-social bystanders. Pro-social Bystanders recognize a situation and seek safe and effective means of intervention. These intervention strategies range from directly confronting the situation or delegating the task to someone more qualified. Only a very small percentage of people commit sexual violence, but we are all part of a community where it is happening. At Tech, we use the 4 D's to talk about bystander intervention:

• Direct- when you feel safe and comfortable, you address the behavior directly
• Distract- when you use a distraction to pull someone away from harm or from harming another
• Delegate- when you bring others attention to harm that is occurring and decide as a group how to intervene or when you call an authority 
• Delay- when you provide support after your suspect harm has occurred

For more information and to request a training about bystander intervention, contact VOICE at voice@gatech.edu. To learn more about sexual violence prevention and bystander intervention skills, attend a Bystander Intervention Training, offered every semester request a workshop on any VOICE topic.

We often think of behaviors such as walking in groups and not accepting drinks from strangers as ways to prevent sexual violence. The truth is, those behaviors do not stop an act of violence from happening. Rather, they reduce the chance that something will happen. It is important to make the distinction between risk reduction and prevention because when risk reduction behaviors are seen as prevention, it puts the responsibility of stopping sexual violence on the victim instead of the perpetrator. Risk reduction behaviors include, but are not limited to:

• Walk in groups 
• Don't walk alone at night
• Cover your drink at parties
• Carry pepper spray

We do not want to discourage people from utilizing risk reduction strategies if they so choose. Often the comfort of knowing you have put in place some safety strategies can help increase enjoyment or decrease anxiety. The challenge is for our community to not rest on risk reduction as the ultimate solution sexual violence.