If your child was in the back room of a fraternity house, about to be sexually assaulted, is there anyone you wouldn’t want to help her?

That’s one of a number of questions Dorothy Edwards, the executive director of Green Dot, etc, asked me last week.

“Would you care if someone thought sexist jokes were funny, or if they were a feminist? Would you say they weren’t good enough to intervene? No. The only thing you would care about is if they knew how to help your kid.”

The recent national conversation about rape has been highly contentious: feminists and anti-rape activists (myself included) are exhausted from explaining over and over how rape culture operates; and even the well-intentioned but ill-informed armchair pundits still tell us that rape would magically disappear if women would just ... behave differently.

But Edwards thinks the traditional feminist strategy of focusing extensively on eliminating “rape culture” isn’t working quickly enough. When she does sexual assault intervention training at a college or in the military, she doesn’t care if the men in audience even know what “rape culture” means or if they laugh at or tell rape jokes – at least, she doesn’t care in the context of any one moment where that same person could intervene to stop a sexual assault.

Wagatwe Wanjuki, a writer and activist associated with Know Your IX, an anti-sexual violence group focused on college students, isn’t sold on Edwards’ arguments. “The best way to stop rape is prevention and stopping the culture that normalizes rape,” she explained.

“Bystander intervention is great, but afterwards, the rapist still exists and he’s still out there in the world.”

She’s right – intervening in a rape does not remove the threat of future assaults from that rapist. But where the Green Dot method succeeds is in removing rapists’ social license to operate. A community immersed in bystander intervention not only makes it much more difficult for perpetrators to attack; it also sends a clear message to rapists that what they are doing is not OK, which moves us towards broader cultural change.

I simply feel desperate to try new ways that might move us more quickly to a more dramatic drop in violence Dorothy Edwards

And bystanders who intervene can stop rape.

For instance, Edwards told me about a typical fraternity member who completed his training, then found himself at a party a few days later, where he saw a man taking a near incapacitated girl into a bedroom. He wasn’t comfortable getting into a direct conflict, so he used what Edwards calls the “distraction” method: he told the would-be assaulter that his car was being towed. While the young man ran out to check on his car, the girls’ friends got her out of the house.

Edwards says it’s not that she’s uninterested in the bigger feminist questions, and she spent years working to end rape culture and talking about the big picture issues like misogyny and victim-blaming in much the same way the majority of anti-rape activists do now.



“I simply feel desperate to try new ways that might move us more quickly to a more dramatic drop in violence,” she said.

According to the results of a five-year study, Edwards’ work is doing just that. The study – which looked at the program’s work in Kentucky high schools – found a more than a 50% reduction in reported sexual violence among students who received Green Dot training, and a 40% reduction in sexual harassment, stalking and dating violence. Schools that didn’t receive the training saw a slight increase in reported violence.

Bystander intervention has the potential to change not just the life of a potential victim but the attitude of an intervener.

One man with whom I spoke – who wasn’t familiar with Edwards’ work and preferred to remain anonymous – intervened in a sexual assault as a sophomore at Ohio University. While attending a fraternity party, he walked in on a female friend who was “totally out of it, ready to pass out”, being assaulted by a man. He says he wouldn’t have recognized it as anything other than a drunken hook-up had it not been for a third person in the room – another man, taking pictures. He managed to get his friend home and safe, but recalls the awful time she had in the campus adjudication process after she reported the incident. “It left a really bad taste in my mouth, and it’s still there almost 20 years later,” he told me.

Edwards is adamant that changing how people act leads to changes in their attitudes, not the other way around. “That’s true across fields – in Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, they say fake it until you make it,” she told me.

Despite Green Dot’s astounding successes, however, Edwards’ methods are likely to meet a lot of resistance in the feminist community. When a young man Edwards was training told her, for example, that he only believed that a woman could be raped if she was passed-out drunk, she didn’t dismiss him out of hand – as many feminists would have, myself included. Instead she said to him, “If what you are saying is that the point at which you will intervene is if someone is passed out, I will accept that.”

She explained to me that, “I thought about how many victims are passed out and if that is what this guy has to give, then fine. Otherwise I lose him altogether.”

But Know Your IX’s Wanjuki insists that “a one-track movement will let people or causes fall through the cracks.” She added, “I think there’s a way to meet people where they’re at while still talking about society as a whole.”

I think there’s a way that they’re both right. We need the higher level conversations about how misogyny and victim-blaming allow rapists to both assault women and get away with it, but we also desperately need to stop individual women from being assaulted. Rape is an epidemic now: we may not be able to change the culture overnight, but we just might be able to stop an attack.

I must admit, though, that Edwards’ approach is a tough sell for a feminist who has done so much work to change the cultural paradigms about sexual assault. What’s tougher still is thinking about my kid in that back room.