VicHealth’s ‘Take Action: Empowering Witnesses To Act On Sexist And Sexually Harassing Behaviours’ – Bystander Action Guide
• VicHealth
VicHealth has developed an action guide to assist organisations to introduce bystander initiatives as part of their work to reduce sexist and sexually harassing behaviours. The guide explains what bystander action is and outlines four key steps for implementing effective bystander initiatives.
- Organisational preparation: ensure there is top-down support and ask leaders to openly and publicly state their support for active bystanders. A clear and enforced sexual harassment policy should also be in place, as well as effective reporting and resolution processes (that workers know they can access as bystanders) and metrics for tracking sexist behaviours and sexual harassment (such as statistics on worker retention by gender).
- Readiness assessment: ask questions of the workforce to gauge skill levels and attitudes, then design initiatives to address the needs identified. For example, if awareness of sexual harassment is low, training should focus on improving recognition. If awareness and intention to act is high, initiatives should focus on behaviour strategies to support bystander action.
- Initiatives: ensure initiatives comply with the ‘EAST’ framework, to make bystander action—Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. Initiatives may be facilitated by technology such as tools to screen communications for gendered language, scan performance reviews for gendered terms, or even detect the number of male or female voices in a meeting. Timely introduction of initiatives may mean they are implemented at a time of cultural change or to pre-empt peak periods for negative behaviour, for example, the work Christmas party season.
Evaluation: a range of indicators should be used. Participants may be asked about whether their behaviour changed (i.e. they took bystander action) in addition to whether they were satisfied with training or another initiative.