ACResolution, The Quarterly Magazine of the Association for Conflict Resolution
Summer 2008 — Download this article

Training Active Bystanders
By Sharon Tracy

Alienation and isolation in our society perpetuate social injustice. Reconnecting, mending broken community ties, acknowledging and acting on our responsibilities for each other and the larger community all promote social justice. In the North Quabbin region of Massachusetts, the post-industrial, semi-rural area where Quabbin Mediation works, violence is exceptionally high. Conflict occurs along class lines (nearly 1/3 of the population lives below the poverty level), and as the demographics of the region have changed over the past 15 years, conflict occurs along racial lines. Three years ago, one high school boy beat another to death with a baseball bat. A group of their peers watched but later said they did not know what to do.

Shortly thereafter, Quabbin Mediation's executive director Sharon Tracy and training director Susan Wallace, met with Ervin Staub, Ph.D., author of  The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children, Adults and Groups Help and Harm Others (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dr. Staub was a child living in Hungary during the Holocaust. His experiences led him to study the roots of violence and work on its prevention and reconciliation; his writings are the basis for Training Active Bystanders (TAB), a program for youth and adults We partnered to create, pilot and evaluate the TAB curriculum, which expands Quabbin Mediation's other violence prevention work carried out in this region for many years. The work includes mediation in the schools, courts, and community, teaching mediation and conflict resolution, and creating innovative programs rooted in these skills, such as a youth-led organization of Cambodian teens who learned conflict resolution to effectively negotiate their experiences with racism, classism, homophobia, sexism and ageism, and Veterans Mediation which provides mediation services by and for veterans and their families.

In TAB we deliberately use specialized language. Though some of the phrases are complex (we explain them in the lessons), they do create a lexicon specific to bystanders, e.g., target rather than victim, harm doer rather than perpetrator. An active bystander is a witness who acts positively rather than ignores, watches passively, or joins in a harmful situation. Trainers elicit a definition of harm doing from trainees (hurtful teasing; excluding someone; telling lies, spreading rumors; threatening; physical violence; stealing; negative comments or gestures with a sexual meaning or about someone's sexual orientation, race or color; and other, sometimes covert, emotional attacks).

Empathy, feelings of responsibility, inclusive caring, courage, and competence help to promote active bystandership. Inhibitors of active bystandership prevent witnesses from helping and include pluralistic ignorance (all bystanders ignoring a situation as if nothing is wrong), diffusion of responsibility (no one knows who is responsible to act), ambiguity regarding the need for help (being unsure whether a person needs help or wants to be left alone), fear of disapproval, and feeling danger of retribution. Moral courage is doing what you believe is right even when acting contrary to the values, beliefs or expectations of people around you.

A bystander can speak up, saying, "What's going on?" or "Do you need help?" They could go for help, or say to a fellow bystander, "I'll talk to the harm doer and you can take the target for a walk." Bystander intervention has many consequences. The bystander is more likely to intervene in other situations, other bystanders are encouraged to act in the moment and in the future, the target sees that someone cares enough about them to take the risk to right a wrong, and the harm doer understands their actions are not acceptable. When bystanders are passive or complicit in harm doing, bystanders, targets and harm doers all learn that people are untrustworthy, cruel and uncaring, and that the world is unjust, unfair, and dangerous. When bystanders remain passive, the likelihood others will help decreases, and the harm doer learns they can continue and increase their harm doing. According to studies by Dr. Staub and others, a community, even a country, can evolve either positively, where caring and justice become the expected norm, or negatively, as has occurred in countries that devolve into genocide.

In 2006, Tracy, Wallace and Staub taught a TAB "Train the Trainers" to three young police officers and 24 middle and high school students from two school districts. The students represented a diverse mix of ability, peer groups, sexuality, gender, race and class. In teams of two students and a police officer, they taught TAB to 800 8th and 10th graders by May 2007.

The curriculum outlines skills for safely intervening to interrupt harm, develops bystander awareness of their power, and teaches bystanders to generate positive actions from others. Being a positive bystander does not mean aggression against the aggressor. Participants practice speaking up, recruiting allies, supporting the target, and encouraging the harm doer to change behavior. The interactive curriculum includes group discussion, role plays, journal writing, games and exercises.

The program differs substantially from anti-bullying and violence prevention curricula. It applies to everyone because each of us has had the experience of being a bystander, of having needed help, and of doing harm (even if unintentionally). TAB trainer and Athol police officer Peter Buck explained further, "Anti-bullying programs only focus on how to respond to negative situations, whereas TAB covers everything. It teaches involvement in a vast variety of situations Ð in rumor control, helping a new student, in a medical emergency, or when somebody is lost. That is what I like about it."

The quantitative evaluation used a questionnaire that we adapted from the Olweus Bully/Victim Scale (1996), a proven measurement tool for school violence and victimization. The data present a clear and consistent picture that TAB reduced harm doing. At baseline, 60 percent of students in both TAB and control schools had been targets of harm doing in the past seven days; at the follow-up, only 45 percent of TAB students were targets while nearly 65 percent of the control school students reported having been targets. The qualitative research, using surveys, student journals, interviews and focus groups, showed youth trainers developed as leaders and applied active bystander language and techniques in peer and family contexts. Students who were taught the TAB curriculum used the new terminology and identified actions they could take as active bystanders. For example, an 8th grader described how she applied TAB, ÒI used this when we were all in a chat room and people were talking about someone getting picked on in school. I stepped up and said ÔStop that. That was not right.'Ó School administrators reported that TAB supports anti-harassment policies, district improvement plans, and civic and social goals of school mission statements. One principal described how it has become expected that bystanders will intervene to stop a fight. A student explained that before TAB, a student could get in trouble for intervening but now students are praised for being active bystanders.

Working together to create this unique program has strengthened relationships among many in the North Quabbin area: youth, local police, schools' administrations, staff and faculty, staff from the offices of the state attorney general and the district attorney, and social service agency people. A student trainer who, previous to TAB, had a very negative opinion about local police, said he now sees them as human beings. People have a sense of ownership and want the program to continue and be replicated in the community. A recent community training included people from the local library, the community coalition, the program for homeless teens, a Native American activist, and someone from the local women's shelter.

We invented TAB because there are no proven violence prevention programs for our demographic, but TAB is easily replicable in different cultural and age-diverse settings because trainers are of the culture in which they teach. TAB gives bystanders the competencies they need if they decide to take action when they witness something they feel is unfair, or wrong, or troubling. When people have the tools to create justice in the moment of need, it can transform those who take the training, the trainers, and the community.


Sharon Tracy is executive director of Quabbin Mediation, a non-profit community mediation and training organization she helped found in 1995. Quabbin Mediation develops sustainable, innovative means of weaving the language and process of creative conflict resolution into the fabric of the community.