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MSSU adds grant-funded position to coordinate bystander intervention program

Joplin Globe - 3/19/2019

March 19-- Mar. 19--Missouri Southern State University is in the process of hiring a coordinator for its Green Dot program, thanks to a grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.

The Green Dot program encourages bystander intervention to promote safe environments. Its trainings incorporate three Ds -- direct, delegate, distract -- to empower individuals to use their words and actions to communicate intolerance for interpersonal violence, specifically sexual assault, dating violence and stalking.

"The bystander approach has been extraordinarily effective because before we started talking about bystanders, we talked about this issue as if there were only two characters: a potential perpetrator and a potential victim," said Dorothy Edwards, the program's founder, in a 2014 interview with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "With only those two characters, we ended up with a really gender-divided movement. By bringing in the third character -- the bystander -- we're able to bring men and women together, bring everything from an incoming freshman to a university president together with the same message.

"It's a proactive and positive message, and it says we can do this in the world that you're already living in if you happen to intersect with one of these potential high-risk situations. So suddenly it's about possibility, and people have responded to that."

Missouri Southern adopted Green Dot in 2016 and offers training sessions that teach students, faculty and staff to recognize situations of power-based violence, strategies to report or handle those situations, and ways to change the culture on campus, officials say.

The full-time coordinator, who is expected to be hired within the next few months, will work with a cross section of the campus to grow and expand the program, said Landon Adams, director of student life and conduct.

"(The new position) allows us as a campus to continue to be proactive in our efforts to make Missouri Southern the safest and most welcoming environment we can," he said.

The Green Dot program was launched at the University of Kentucky in the 2006-07 academic year and has since spread across university campuses. Variations of the program can be applied to pupils as young as kindergarten and to communities such as the U.S. Air Force and some Native American tribes. It is even among the CDC-recommended approaches to combating sexual violence.

Research published in 2015 suggested that campuses implementing Green Dot had lower rates of violence victimization and perpetration, specifically of sexual harassment and stalking, when compared with campuses without bystander intervention training.

"Green Dot may impact violence rates by training students to see their own role and responsibility within their social network to proactively create safety plans, to speak up when they hear about or see situations that make them concerned about their own or another's safety (including sexually offensive or harassing language), and to consider avoiding risky settings or behaviors," the researchers said in their published report.

Ken Kennedy, chief of police at Missouri Southern and a certified Green Dot trainer, said bystander training sessions have taken place on campus about once per semester. But he hopes the new coordinator will bring attention to the program so more students participate.

"We're really hoping that this gives us a big expansion of the program," he said.

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