What’s Your Green Dot?

Ending Violence One Green Dot at a Time

This past Winter Quarter interns of the Violence Intervention and Prevention (VIP) program launched a Green Dot awareness campaign on campus. Green Dot is about engaging students in bystander intervention to create a safe campus environment through the power of community.

Green dot provides a few methods of intervention, called the 3 D’s, which include:

• Direct: this is a very confrontational approach. Directly asking the potential victim if they are alright.

• Distract: get the parties away from each other. Say something like “Do you know what time it is?”

• Delegate: get other people involved, or call the police.

The interns collected nearly 1,000 ‘green dots’ or bystander intervention stories from students through outreach to clubs, organizations, and their peer, academic, and social groups, as well as general outreach to the campus community through tabling efforts. They then worked closely with six residence halls —Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz, San Miguel, San Nicolas, Santa Rosa, and Anacapa— to put up displays of the green dots to engage student residents in the role of bystander intervention as a means to stop interpersonal violence on campus and share the powerful bystander stories of their peers on campus. The idea is that not one person has to do everything, but everyone has to do something. So, what’s your Green Dot?