Breaking the Script and Making a Change

In the wake of the terrifying and tragic disappearance of Hannah Graham, 18-year-old University of Virginia student, campus safety is a topic everyone is talking about. Walking home at night can be a particularly dangerous, and there are several precautions that can be taken to make your night out a safe one. However, in order to achieve significant changes to make Yale a safer environment, we need to broaden the conversation to talk about what we can all do as a community support each other. 

Freshmen and sophomores are required to participate in CCE workshops that focus on safety, allies and low-level intervention skills, in order to build a more supportive campus community.  In these workshops we discuss how each one of us can make a difference, both as a student of Yale and as a member of the broader New Haven Community.  Firstly, within our group of close friends, we can look out for each other in several ways.  One point that the CCE facilitators emphasize is that intervention has many upsides and very few downsides.  Thus, checking in and making sure your friend is okay in any situation is almost always good idea.  If you see your friend acting strangely or in a seemingly uncomfortable conversation, it can’t hurt to walk over and either try to subtly gauge the situation or ask if they are doing okay.

While the first place we usually look for allies is our friends, it is equally important as members of the Yale community to constantly be aware that these situations can happen to anyone.  Even for people we might not know well, or at all, we should be prepared to intervene when necessary. When out at a party or a bar, for example, there are several people that can act as allies besides your close friends, such as the party host or the bouncer. 

While the Hannah Graham case is a horrible tragedy, we should not allow these types of rare events to shift our focus completely to stranger danger and away from interpersonal violence, which is actually much more prevalent.  It is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that the perpetrators of these types of misconducts are always the sketchy strangers lurking in the alleyways, but the scary truth is that these situations occur between acquaintances, and even close friends, even more frequently. Thus, broadening the conversation to talk about building community values is critical.

The CCEs recommend four steps to action: pay attention and be alert to things that make you feel uncomfortable, decide if someone should intervene, make a plan to fit your intervention to the situation and finally, make it happen.  These actions work so well because by simply stepping into the situation, you “break the script” to stop a potentially bad situation from unfolding.  As members of the Yale and New Haven communities, we can each play a part in creating a safer environment each and every day.