Learning to stand up for someone

Objectives

The activity promotes social responsibility and ways of taking action.

Instructions

An upstander is a person who speaks or acts in support of an individual or cause, particularly someone who intervenes on behalf of a person being attacked or bullied.

How to make the shift from bystander to upstander?

Ask for examples of possible situations (e.g. accident, person gets ill, person throws paper/plastic on the street, woman is harrassed on the bus, fight in the street, sexual comment at the workplace, bullying at the workplace, etc.).

Quite often when many people are arround in such situatiations no one acts. This is called the bystander-effect. But it can be by-passed by someone taking a first step… then the group starts to work together. This person who takes the first step is an upstander.

Explain the bystander-effect (group= diffusion of responsibility, uncertainty and group cohesiveness).

• Work in groups and let participants come up with a scenario or let participants share situations where they needed help or wished somenone had intervened on their behalf.
• Think about ways to react and things to say as an upstander.
• Make a small sketch about the situation and the reaction as an upstander.
• Let participants play the sketch.
• Reflect on the sketch with the whole group: Are there other things you could do or ways to react?

Variant

Can be linked to rolemodels in history who acted as upstanders (Rosa Parks, Greta Thunberg, etc.) or movements (black lives matter, #metoo, climate action, etc.) and/or whisteblowers.

Links

https://humanrights.ca/upstander/#/intro

https://www.facinghistory.org/upstander