Bystander intervention in your pocket

[bloodygranuaile]

The politics book club is for its next book reading Shawna Potter’s Making Spaces Safer, the full book and definitely not the pocket guide. But given that I have already read the full book and had not yet read my copy of the pocket guide, I decided to refresh my memory by reading the pocket guide version. (Serendipitously, shortly after making this decision a comrade contacted me about the sample posters/policies in the back of the book version, so I did end up taking a skim through those.) 

 

The pocket guide is, predictably, somewhat redundant if you have already read the book version, but it nevertheless contains some good solid basics in case you are in need of brushing up on them—defining harassment, victim-centered approaches to responding to it, bystander intervention tips for when you’re not in a position of authority. The further reading and resources list also looks pretty solid upon first glance, and there are some blank pages for filling in your local resources, which would make it more useful as a literal pocket guide—something to keep in your pocket when you’re on a community safety team.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the thing that really struck me was how foreign the idea of going to bars or shows or whatever struck me as lately. The other striking thing was how aware I was that, although I have already taken all these trainings, they all suddenly seem really weird and I suspect I’d have a more difficult time than I should operationalizing them—all my people skills frayed into the ether sometime around week 3 or 4 of quarantine. It looks like I’ll be needing to brush up with the full-length version again once things go back to real meetings.