When a close friend took a romantic interest in her, a woman surnamed Chiang (江) rejected him outright, but he persisted. He threatened her with physical violence, sexually abused and harassed her, stalked her, took money from her and cut her off from family and friends.
Chiang didn’t get any support or empathy after she left that abusive relationship, either. All she got were questions about why she had put herself in a dangerous situation in the first place.
“It was a very isolating experience,” Chiang, who wanted to remain anonymous for her safety, tells the Taipei Times. “There is a great deal of social condemnation toward victims of sexual violence.”
Photo courtesy of Women’s March Taiwan
When her harrowing experience ended, the thought that others might find themselves similarly isolated and vulnerable motivated Chiang, now a private tutor, to learn how to support other survivors.
On Sunday, she was among the participants at a workshop co-hosted by Women’s March Taiwan and Caritta Lin (林嘉萍). Lin is Taiwan’s first trainer certified in the Green Dot strategy, devised to prevent power-based violence by empowering bystanders to intervene.
FROM BYSTANDER TO UPSTANDER
Photo: Caritta Lin
Chiang’s abuser was masterful at psychological manipulation, lying to her about almost every aspect of his life, including his job, social circles and family background, while simultaneously abusing at least 20 other women in similar fashion.
It was a textbook case of power-based violence, which uses control, intimidation, manipulation and coercion to harm victims. In particular, gender-based violence feeds off the unequal power relationships between men and women, and disproportionately affects women.
As many as one-in-four women between the ages of 18 and 74 have suffered intimate partner violence in their lifetime, according to a 2016 survey by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. While many might imagine physical beatings, the most common form of abuse was emotional and psychological, at 21 percent of cases.
Photo courtesy of Women’s March Taiwan
About 80 percent of cases seen by the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (婦女救援基金會) involve female victims. Advocacy and research development manager Ansel Yu (游政韋) says that while there is general awareness of the severity of gender-based violence — in 2017, 118,586 cases of domestic violence and 11,069 cases of sexual assault were reported — most people do not know what they can do about it.
Most people are not victims or perpetrators of violence, but third-party bystanders. That role encompasses a wide range of actors, from the perpetrator’s closest confidante to the nearest passerby during an altercation. All of these actors can be allies to victims if they choose.
Despite already being tuned in to the discourse around violence prevention and bodily autonomy, Chiang felt she had let herself down by not becoming the “ideal” victim in the throes of victim-blaming during and shortly after her abuse.
“Because of fear and ignorance, I was completely paralyzed,” she says, and did not put up a fight against her partner during abusive episodes. In those moments, a friend’s interruption or questioning of her partner’s behavior would have strengthened her.
In addition to taking preventive action before any abuse occurs, Yu says that bystanders are also an important source of support for victims.
Even though there are comprehensive social services for domestic violence in Taipei, social workers may only be able to follow cases for three to six months due to resource constraints and heavy caseloads. Within this timeframe, social workers can remove victims from the immediate surroundings where they are at risk, but may not be able to tackle lingering effects of power-based violence, such as trauma, shame and social stigma.
Even armed with this knowledge, Yu says there are three main concerns that inhibit bystanders from acting: personality traits, such as shyness; social relations, such as being unsure whether they have the standing to intervene; and the external environment, such as their own safety and accuracy in reading the situation.
The Green Dot strategy, developed in the US by educator and counselor Dorothy Edwards, is designed to work around these inhibitions. Bystanders are trained in three methods of intervention and can adjust their response according to their concerns. They can cause a distraction to deescalate the situation; they can directly stop the perpetrator or ask the victim if they need help; or they can delegate the task to someone with influence over the situation, such as a friend of those involved.
Yu adds that the Green Dot strategy is useful for other kinds of work involving personal empowerment, beyond power-based violence. Youth and disability advocates and teachers working in suicide prevention are among the volunteers for the Foundation’s program to train bystander intervention advocates.
RECOGNIZING ABUSE
One of the most basic steps to escape or prevent violence is also the most difficult — to recognize that abuse is happening.
Warning signs of abusive behavior include feeling jealous or possessive, spending less time with family and friends and checking in frequently with your partner. But, as Lin points out in the Green Dot workshop, these are also true of normal relationships. The key difference is understanding how the party on the receiving end feels about these behaviors.
For one workshop participant, surnamed Yu (玉), bad experiences with dates who were turned off by inappropriate behavior on his part — such as moving too quickly to hold hands or initiate other forms of physical intimacy — motivated him to learn more about consent.
Yu says that for zhainan (宅男, a euphemism for a computer nerd) like himself, who have not interacted much with women, social pressure and messaging from the media and dating gurus to “be a bad boy, have personality and not be too obedient” can be confusing.
Zhainan “often cannot tell the difference between ‘not being obedient’ and ‘not respecting other people’s boundaries,’” Yu says.
Bystander intervention training has not only provided him with tactics to prevent violence against others, but also an education in those boundaries.
These days, Yu puts a renewed emphasis on “being myself,” saying that a weak sense of self-worth amplified the pressure he felt to fit into a predefined mold of masculine boldness.
Although their experiences are so divergent, Yu’s words echo Chiang when she describes how her lack of self-esteem made her susceptible to violence.
Chiang says that for a long time after leaving her abuser, she would often dream about him chasing after her in a murderous rage. In the dream, she would always run away in terror.
It is only after the past year of working hard at personal development, finding supportive people and removing negative influences from her life that Chiang’s nightmare has started to recede.
“When I dream of him now, even though I may feel afraid, I don’t run away anymore,” she says.
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