Bystanders in “sketchy” sexual situations: Their constructions of the “girl,” the “guy,” and themselves

Abstract

In this paper we explore through discourse analysis the written personal narratives (vignettes) of “sketchy” sexual situations that students found themselves in as bystanders. We asked for these vignettes in a larger study examining the relationships between moral judgment/reasoning and intervening or not in situations of potential sexual assault. Through a Foulcauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA), we explore in these narratives discursive constructions, positioning of potential victims, potential perpetrators, and bystanders of sexual assault, as well as the action orientations these discourses suggest, and the implications for rape prevention programs.

Keywords

bystanders sexual assault discourse analysis narratives Boston MA

Sexual assault on college and university campuses is a significant problem. A 2016 US Bureau of Justice survey of nine schools found 3 to 20 per cent of female undergraduates experienced a completed sexual assault in college on campus, with only 12.5 per cent of these reported (Krebs et al., 2016). Another recent study across 27 institutions of higher education found 12 per cent of students experienced non-consensual penetration or sexual touching by force or incapacitation, with female students and transgender/genderqueer/nonconforming students reporting the highest rates (Cantor et al., 2015).

Colleges and universities in the US are now required to offer programming to prevent sexual assault, although students complete these programs on a voluntary basis and many are one-off experiences, even though the Centers for Disease Control (CDC, 2014) in the US has also warned that brief one-time interventions are not effective (DeGue, 2014). Most sexual assault prevention programs are educational and address potential victims and perpetrators (Dills, Fowler, & Payne, 2016). But many campuses have also started to include bystander-focused training programs in which students are encouraged and taught to intervene when they see a potential assault occurring and also to speak up when they see individuals acting on campus in such a way that gives passive permission for such assaults (Katz & Moore, 2013; Moynihan & Banyard, 2008). This latter goal is often referred to as addressing “rape culture.”

Rape culture is a concept that developed out of 1970s feminism that implicated “normal gender relations” in the “maintenance and support of rape,” i.e. cultural scaffolding (Gavey, 2005, p. 30). The idea grew and took hold in mainstream psychology and sociology, including concepts such as “rape myth acceptance,” which argued that myths about how rapes occur, what constitutes rape, and who is responsible, perpetuate the public's passive acceptance of rape and contribute to the lack of legal remedies (Burt, 1980). In her original definition of rape myths, Burt used as an example the following belief, which applies to current hookup culture: “if a woman gets drunk at a party and has intercourse with a man she's just met there, she should be considered ‘fair game’ to other males at the party who want to have sex with her too whether she wants to or not” (p. 223).

Today, support of rape culture also exists in the form of slut shaming where young women on campus are judged using gendered moralist norms, while also being seen as fully agentic (Bay-Cheng, 2015). The sexual agency accorded to young women is undermined by a “normative space that divides them from one another, compels self-blame, and predicates their worth on cultural appraisals of their sexuality” (Bay-Cheng, 2015, p. 279). Ringrose and Reynold (2012) also point out that labeling a young woman a slut is not only a sexist act, given males are still protected from this shaming, but a deeply classed discourse, wherein young women from less privileged classes are more vulnerable to being shamed than others, and the words used (e.g. “trashy”) evoke hate language commonly used for lower class women. Both rape myths and slut shaming serve as excuses for rape.

The recent focus on campus culture may have brought renewed interest in how rape culture is supported by institutions, whether through “campus climate,” “hookup culture,” “slut shaming,” or whether it is combatted by the more recent political activism around #metoo. Bystander training, because it focuses outside the protected he said/she said space, may be able to address rape culture on campuses. When bystanders step in, they make the status quo of gendered social relations less acceptable or unacceptable.

Even though some sexual assault prevention programs, including some bystander intervention training programs, are effective in producing attitude change (e.g. Cissner, 2009; Moynihan & Banyard, 2008; Senn et al., 2015), save for one rape prevention program (Senn et al, 2015), most do not typically result in fewer sexual assaults (Anderson & Whiston, 2005; Katz & Moore, 2013). A more recent analysis particular to bystander intervention campaigns suggests that they are rarely effective in preventing rape on campus although they may change attitudes (Jouriles, Krauss, Vu, Banyard, & McDonald, 2018). This unfortunate finding suggests that rape culture is difficult to change via simple educational campaigns, that patriarchy is hard to change in a semester or two, or that bystanders even when well-trained can do little to prevent sexual assault.

Yet, it may be that we need to know more about how bystanders think and construct the situations they find themselves in to improve bystander intervention training. Changing rape myth acceptance is a start but understanding the gendered norms that bystanders work with in sketchy sexual situations may lead to different kinds of trainings. In the current research, we were interested in the way college students construct the sketchy sexual situation and how these constructions relate to intervening and also betray attitudes, perceptions, and norms that are gendered and could maintain the unequal treatment of women and men on campus. We were open to the idea that constructing the “sketchy” situation in ways that encouraged intervening might also, unwittingly, still support rape culture.

To this end we used a form of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis as outlined by Willig (2013) to understand how students construct the “sketchy” situations they were in when they needed to decide whether to intervene or not. In the following analysis, we focus primarily on how participants position the subjects in their narratives as well as themselves as bystanders.

Methods

Sample

The sample was a diverse cohort of students attending an urban, public university in the US. The university is a commuter campus and so the narratives that students provided were about situations that occurred off campus. This is an important addition to the literature as many studies have focused on primarily white residential college campuses and not on this age group of young adults who attend parties and clubs off campus and who are also at risk. Of the 269 undergraduates who volunteered, 233 completed the initial part of the questionnaire that asked for demographics and the provision of a written narrative of a “sketchy” sexual situation.

Fifty of the vignettes were not used in the analysis because they did not describe a specific bystander scenario, which left us with a sample of 183 vignettes. Relevancy was determined by the type of situation described. Narratives that were excluded were narratives that told the story of the author's own victimization, a non-sexual situation, or vague commentary about problem situations in general without providing information about a specific situation.

Of the 183 final vignettes or written narratives, the vast majority involved at least one person being under the influence of alcohol, which is consistent with the literature on sexual assaults on campus (Cantor et al., 2015). Almost all of the narratives described situations in which males were potential perpetrators against females and 59 per cent described a situation in which they intervened by confronting the potential perpetrator, distracting him, forcing her/himself into a conversation, asking the potential victim if she was okay, or notifying the potential victim's friends. Of those who provided usable vignettes, 58 were male, two were transgender, one unidentified, and 122 female. Racially and ethnically the sample identified themselves as follows: 101 white students; 31 Latino with backgrounds from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and other Spanish-speaking countries and territories; 27 Asian American with backgrounds from Laos, Viet Nam, Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and other East Asian countries; 16 black or African American students; one Native American; seven choosing not to reveal their race or writing “mixed.” Their ages ranged from 18 to 39 with a mean age of (M = 21.82; SD = 4.2).

Procedures

A large data set was gathered via a survey of students at the university, and quantitative results of this survey which examined moral foundations of interveners vs non-interveners are published elsewhere (Gable, Lamb, Brodt, & Attwell, 2017). Along with the survey data collected, participants were asked to describe a “sketchy sexual situation” they were a witness to, describe if they intervened or not, and provide reasons for why they did or did not intervene. The term “sketchy” was intentionally used to bypass the issue of a legal definition and because we wanted participants to write about situations in which students already believed that something wrong or harmful could potentially be occurring or be about to occur.

The initial question for the online questionnaire was phrased in a way to jog the memory of the narrative writer, suggesting that at a party or other situation where drinking might be involved, the participant may have observed someone being exploited or someone taking advantage of someone else. The participant was asked to “Think back and try to remember the situation in detail.” After participants filled in the bubble that permitted them to write as long a narrative as they wished, they were asked particular questions about the narrative: “If you intervened in any way before during or after, please describe how?”; “What were your reasons for intervening or not intervening?”. They were then asked for information about their relationship to the individuals in the narrative, the gender, and whether there were substances involved: “Did you perceive anyone to be influenced by substances at the time?” They then went on to take surveys relating to another study (Gable et al., 2017).

The initial prompt pinpointed a drinking environment – “where because of drinking or other issues” – and was purposeful; we wanted to study what we deemed to be typical scenarios that occur in “hookup culture” (Garcia, Reiber, Massey, & Merriwether, 2012), where a potential rape was about to occur. Previous research has indicated that most of these situations occur in an atmosphere where there is drinking (Bogle, 2008; Cantor et al., 2015; Garcia et al., 2012; Wade, 2017). The wording was meant to evoke a common situation where these incidents occur rather than provide an excuse for problem behavior, and that is why the phrase “other issues” was added.

Participants were offered the opportunity to enter their names in a raffle on a separate website to win one of three gift cards. They then proceeded to answer survey question for the quantitative study published elsewhere.

Analysis

Willig's (2013) version of a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis was undertaken to focus on how the students understood the subjects in those situations, and how gender played a role in their positioning themselves as bystanders and positioning the others involved. FDA assumes knowledge is constructed through language and meaning, and thus analysing language and meaning will allow us to view how knowledge is constructed, and what functions it serves. It is understood that a group of texts not only reveals something about the individuals who produce it, but the culture and repertoire of ideologies available at the time in a culture. Any data which includes meaning, including short written narratives such as ours, are suitable for FDA (Willig, 2013). Furthermore, FDA promotes an analysis of what a certain construct does in terms of positioning individuals, what it enables in terms of action, and what meaning is made within a certain culture (Magnusson & Marecek, 2015).

The Foucauldian analysis applied in this research was that described by Willig (2013) and discussed in Magnusson and Marecek's (2015) review of qualitative research methods. We initially identified keywords about the context of these situations, salient concepts, commonalities and differences throughout the data, relationships between sections of data, and analysed missing data and transitions. We then structured our investigation using Willig's (2013) six stages of discourse analysis: “discursive constructions,” “positioning,” “discourses,” “subjectivities,” “action orientations,” and “practices.” Willig's discussion of “discursive objects” led us in uncovering how gendered subjects were being created by participants; for example, the “classless” girl becomes a discursive object used in the narrative to justify or excuse not intervening. Action orientations suggested by positioning were also examined. The way actors are positioned in subject positions can yield insight into the power structures and power relations important to a Foucauldian and feminist analysis that suggest what action, if any, can be taken. We also looked at the way discourse allows for certain feelings, thoughts, and experiences. In the analysis, we do not present each step separately.

Vignettes were read multiple times with different questions based on the suggestions Willig posed at each stage and through the “sceptical” reading attitude encouraged by Gill (2000). Each vignette was revisited repeatedly and numerous times throughout the analysis by the two co-authors. Also important to note is that because a majority of the vignettes involved a male potential perpetrator and a female potential victim, we use the pronoun “he” when speaking generally about potential perpetrators and “she” when speaking generally about potential victims. We generically refer to men as “guys” and women as “girls” to follow the custom of almost all of the participants in their narratives, however disrespectful this might sound to the ears of the feminist reader.

All quote excerpts reproduced in the analysis below appear in their original form, with misspellings and grammatical problems intact if they were present in the original.

Results

Constructing the sketchy situation

The Party. Many of the scenarios generated occurred within a party-based atmosphere (house party, bar, and club) as suggested in our prompt. Narrators paid particular attention to the drinking atmosphere of the party: “Everyone was drunk,” “I was at a work party once and almost everyone was drunk,” “Everyone was drinking and having a good time” and “Maybe ten of us were at the party, but all of us had been under the influence.” These introductory sentences worked to normalize the drinking in the situation, to position the party as typical. Even when the drinking of the potential victim was noted, the drinking was not presented as some sort of underlying cause. This was accomplished by noting that her or his drinking was similar to others': “there was a friend of mine who had been drinking heavily, along with everyone else.” Drinking in general was normalized. Also normalized were situations where boys were purposely getting girls drunk: “parties where boys have purposely served alcohol to girls in order to get them drunk and seduce them” or where one, as an underclassman, was part of a group commissioned, so to speak, to bring younger women to the party to get them drunk. Those who included in their narratives that they did not drink or do drugs in college were careful not to use judgmental or accusing language about peers who do.

The sketchiness of the situation was constructed as a “weird” feeling about something the bystander observed and not the aforementioned getting girls drunk: “I knew it was weird and sketchy that someone not invited was going into someone else's room.” Participants often used feeling language rather than reasoning: “it felt sketchy,” for example, or “he kissed her and lead her into a different room and closed the door. Her friend walked away but I felt weird about it.”

Sketchiness was constructed in one particular way that we explore more fully below in the discussion of “the guy,” but in many of the vignettes, narrators, particularly intervening narrators, noted persistence or aggression; i.e. the guy was “leading her,” “grabbing her,” “forcing her,” or “blocking her.” Over and beyond aggression, what appeared to be most important in defining a guy as a problem was his persistence. Persistence of a girl saying no was not something typically noted nor important to defining a situation as sketchy or something that alerted a narrator to the sketchiness. But a man who persisted was suspect: “He came back many times.” The zeroing in on persistence in effect excuses and makes normal situations such as those mentioned by several narrators that were one-time experiences, e.g. when walking through a bar where women had to walk between men, they would touch them sexually. They also described men's “casual” refusal to give women enough room when going to the bathroom at a party. These situations did not involve persistence, and were not seen as worthy of intervention.

Constructing the girl

Girls were constructed within these scenes and assessed in terms of discomfort they expressed, drunkenness, and whether they were there with friends. Narrators used these aspects of the scene to position girls in the following ways, as agents, helpless, confusing to the onlooker, or to blame.

In a bystander's assessment of the need for intervention, the level of comfort expressed by the girl was a key indicator of a need for intervention. Even if she was very drunk, her laughing or “allowing” (as some narrators wrote) harassing kinds of sexual acts was not discounted by her drunkenness. When a bystander noted discomfort, when a girl was “visibly uncomfortable,” her discomfort triggered a worry that she might be being harmed, as in the following narrative:

I was at a party and everyone was drinking, they were playing truth or dare and it started to get a little intense. There was a girl there who seemed like she didn't belong there but maybe she was just trying to be cool by going to parties. Anyways someone dared her to kiss one of the guys and she clearly felt uncomfortable but she did it anyways. The guy kept trying to talk to her throughout the night but she seemed like she didn't want to be there anymore, he kept trying to kiss her and touch her body but she would just move away. I felt like I should say something but I didn't, she eventually got tired and realized that she didn't want to be there anymore so she left with her friends. The guy tried to go after her but the other guys told him to chill, it was kind of a sketchy situation but luckily (nothing) more serious happened.

When detailing the intoxication, authors were primarily interested in the drunkenness of the girls and not others in the narrative. Narrative authors gave examples to signify the excessive levels by referring to how the girl was falling over, slurring her words, or how she “looked completely out of it.” This detailing generally served to support the author's assessment of her helplessness, positioning the guy as powerful in relation to her vulnerability. Drunkenness was the primary way by which power over a person was assessed in the situation. Missing from the discourse were descriptions of a guy or girl's build, or information with regard to their intelligence, race, age, or popularity or any other aspect that might also be related to power, such as race.

Finally, whether a girl had friends with her was an important element of the narrative in assessing what was happening and what would happen to a drunk girl, as in the following narrative.

There were a lot of us who noticed how drunk she was. She appeared a little sad and pathetic because she had no friends around her and was allowing any guys to talk and touch her. Everyone just looked and ignored the possible danger that she is getting herself into. Initially I noticed how intoxicated she was by her inability to stand up straight and constant stumbling. She was with a guy. I realized later that this guy was annoyed with how drunk she was, and that it wasn't even worth it anymore, so he left her and shifted his focus elsewhere. I realized then, that they weren't there together. Another guy approached her and was all over her, which she allowed. She was possibly being taken advantage of by how close he was to her, but she was too intoxicated to care. Nor did the people watch (and myself) cared enough to do something about it.

Although this narrator noted “how intoxicated she was” judged by her inability to stand up straight and stumbling, there was reluctance to position her as helpless and in need of care. Note the narrator sees her only as “possibly” being taken advantage of, with her being “too intoxicated to care.” The girl's intoxication appears to make her the one responsible for what she will and won't “allow” and whether or not others should “watch” or “care” about her. Most telling is that this girl is seen as “sad and pathetic because she had no friends around her.” A drunk girl alone, rather than appearing vulnerable and in need of assistance, is sad and pathetic. As in other narratives, if she was with friends, the judgment that a friend was being taken advantage of when drunk was almost always clear, and the friends were responsible for her care.

The helpless girl. As noted in the above narrative, the girl alone, although completely drunk, was not positioned as helpless. She was positioned as allowing acts to be done to her. In some narratives, when drinking was normalized, the helpless girl was positioned thus to seemingly avoid a slut-shaming discourse. Being drunk could release a girl from any responsibility: “she couldn't pull herself together to get out” or she was “not in her right mind.” Even when responding physically to a potential assaulter, she is positioned as having no agency because of her drunkenness. In this kind of positioning, the narrator was able to express a strong sense of concern and would seemingly call for intervention by a savior. In other narratives the helpless girl was positioned as needing to find some source of agency within, e.g. she “finally started pushing him away.” In the latter instances, the helpless girl did not need a saviour but needed to pull herself out of her drunken state at least momentarily to protect herself. In the latter constructions, the need for a bystander to step in is then closed off as responsibility lies with the girl.

The girl with agency. The girl with agency is depicted from the start as allowing things to be done to her, as in “she stayed” and “she allowed.” This was not always a blaming discourse. For some narrators, she was depicted as both not knowing the “danger she is getting herself into” and not knowing how to say no when she doesn't do enough to prevent the men's advances. Thus she was a foolish or innocent agent, but an agent nonetheless. Sometimes references to agency were part of a narrative in which the situation turned aggressive. In these narratives, when the “perpetrator” became aggressive, the bystander was permitted to intervene in a situation in spite of the girl's agency. Even when the girl seemed to be choosing to “stay” or “allow,” aggression called for intervention. Finally, assessing whether a girl had agency appeared to be more important to male participants than female participants. In their narratives, guys were loathe to step in after assessing agency from a girl.

The confusing friend. When the narrator was a friend, the girl was often positioned as confusing, thus making it unclear to the narrator whether or not she or he should intervene. Watching a friend involved an assessment of whether the friend was consenting or not, even if she was drunk: Is she “just tipsy?” Are there signs of discomfort? Is she the kind of person who does this a lot, called “promiscuous” in one or two vignettes but not judgmentally so. Friends did not slut shame. The second kind of confusion came when a girl they knew who would typically want to hook up with new guys at a party chose to go off with a guy. The confusion came when she was assessed to be very drunk but comfortable and having a good time. In one dramatic narrative the narrator had been called in to join her friend having sex with someone she didn't know well.

Vera started yelling things like: “no don't go!!! stay!! please!! It's so much fun.” I left regardless. I walked back in my room. I lied in my bed: pretty distraught, quite confused. I started thinking “that's not like Vera to want me to join in on her “adventures.” Yes, she did seem to have a lot of sexual partners, but still, something seemed off. I knocked on the door and walked back in. I whispered in her ear: “vera are you okay? are you wanting this?” She replied “YOU can have him!! I'm done here. I'm going to go downstairs.” He wouldn't have that. He wanted her to stay. He wasn't finished, was what he said. It was clear to me Vera was way to (sic) intoxicated to be able to say no to this man. Already intimidated by this man, I pulled him outside, after he got a little more decent. I told him, “Dan, you have to leave. Vera does not want this right now and she is unable to speak up for herself in this condition.” He did not take that well. He kept saying that it wasn't my business, that I am ruining his night. I knew that my next days at work would be so uncomfortable, and yes a senior might shun me. Oh well. This was her safety. That was important to me. I waited outside the room with the door open until he had all his clothes on and his things, and I made sure he left. As he left, Vera came up to me and hugged me excessively. She was so happy he was gone. And I was just in shock.

In this narrative, the friend understands and has little judgment about the fact that her friend has a lot of sexual partners. But she was confused by Vera's exhortation that “It's so much fun,” her drunkenness “way to (sic) intoxicated,” and her begging her to stay. Her returning to the room was based on an intuition that something wasn't right and then the guy's persistence, after her friend's refusal, turned this into a situation that needed intervention. But what is to be noted in the confusing friend scenario is that the friend would like to permit the hookup if genuinely desired.

The blameworthy girl. Slut shaming did occur, but sometimes regretfully as a non-intervener expressed regret in assuming a girl was “just another classless girl” of “promiscuous character” when she could have been “drugged and helpless.” The blameworthy girl is set up in opposition to a helpless girl and blameworthiness was used as a way to justify not intervening: “she didn't put up a big fight” and “allowing any guys to talk and touch her.” When the tone was blaming, the expectation was that a girl was able to take preventative action but chose not to, or that the intervener would be under attack if he or she stepped in:

There were multiple instances were [sic] I have witnessed this person exploit herself to multiple people and I have tried to step in and help her while she has been heavily under the influence of drugs and alcohol not knowing where she was or who she was with or what she was doing, but somehow I was always the bad guy … nothing mattered, she was the type of person who did not care 100% what anybody thought about her.

In this case, the narrator justifies his decision not to intervene on the grounds that the girl was unconcerned about her reputation. How can men exploit a girl who has chosen to be where she was and whom she was with, in that condition?

While several narratives suggested that “party girls” are not judged, in the narrative below, the narrator refers to a girl as “class-less” and makes the assumption that others did not help her at the party because she was “getting what she deserved.”

Everyone else there may have thought that she was just another class-less girl who is getting what she deserved, therefore, they just let her be. They could also not think twice about her actually being a victim because her behavior says that she is a party girl, who is promiscuous and that is just who she is and what she does.

There was one way a girl could be both blameworthy and not to blame, a chooser and yet unknowing – if she was young.

Who didn't want to be invited to the hottest (high school) party with the most popular crowd, I know I sure did. Well at least that's what I thought … I did note that this one particular girl who I knew was a sophomore and had no business being there because she frankly was way too young. I watched her all night throw back the beers, the shots and the endless puffs of marijuana, and something told me that she felt more pressured to feel the need to fit in then to say no. Guys thoroughly took advantage of her and touched her in places that were not appropriate it. I got sick to my stomach said something to her and then to the boys and stormed out the party. I wasn't going to part of such ignorance.

In this narrative the girl is positioned as an agent, throwing back the beers, but the narrator sees her as feeling pressure to fit in. This understanding of context and how context shapes consent was rare in the narratives and perhaps present in this one because the narrator was now an older undergraduate thinking back to a party that occurred 15 years ago. She saw the girl as both agentic and “way too young” and her intervention was to say something to all of the kids there, as if they were all blameworthy, and to storm out of the party. She may have held the girl responsible, but she held everyone else responsible too.

Constructing the guy

Guys who were not bystanders were positioned in these narratives as weird, aggressive and/or “persistent.” The aggressive guy is the character in the narratives that made intervening possible and created heroes of interveners. Those bystanders who note that a guy was “leading her,” “grabbing her,” “forcing her” or “blocking her” were compelled to act. Bystanders also noted when an action was “not extremely forced”, which appeared to relieve them from responsibility to act. While aggression was important, what appeared to be most important in defining a guy as a problem was his persistence. As noted earlier, when a guy was persistent he was assumed to be taking away a girl's agency. These guys would corner a girl and were described as “relentless,” “extremely pushy” and it was often noted “he would not stop bothering her.”

While persistence seemed to construct a guy as a problem and the situation as one needing intervention, perceiving the guy as a “stranger” added to this construction: “I wanted to say they don't know each other because they didn't come in together.” This discourse of the persistent stranger was used to support the assessment that the guy may have been “taking advantage” of the girl and made his persistence even more unethical. But this way of talking about problem strangers raises the question regarding when a bystander or a girl knows the persistent guy. If a girl knew the guy, it raised more concerns for the bystander about interfering or invading someone's privacy if indeed the couple were dating.

Constructing the bystander

Outsiders

While a strange guy was more easily seen as a potential perpetrator, many bystanders also positioned themselves as outsiders. They did this in various ways. They may have written that they were strangers to the couple in the interaction. They may have emphasized at the beginning of their narrative that they don't drink or do drugs or that they are not a partier: “I'm a cautious person.” They may also have positioned themselves as an outsider by their reaction: “I couldn't believe my eyes.” These ways of positioning themselves outside of the interaction could serve to support inaction, allowing them a position that would not incur as much guilt for not intervening. As outsiders they didn't have enough information about the individuals involved and could argue they didn't want to “be getting myself involved in other people's business.” They removed themselves from the situation saying, I was “more of an observer,” excusing through distancing. This positioning of the self outside of the action, literally standing by, allowed the narrators to shift responsibility to others who might know the individuals or situation better, or to the girl who needed to have signalled lack of consent more clearly.

The “really good guy.” The “really good” guy is positioned in opposition to a “weird” guy or “persistent” guy as a protector. “Weird” in these vignettes stands for being a stranger to the bystander and potentially to the girl, the guy who hangs around for an opportunity to take advantage of her. In one narrative, the bystander wrote:

In my head I was watching the situation happen and hoping the boy was either a really good guy and good friend of hers that was trying to help her out but there was another part of me that was wondering where her girl friends were and wishing she had someone to help her get to her room safely. When i turned back 10 min later they were both gone and I can only hope he brought her to her room safely and made sure she was okay but there are weird people out there who would take advantage of a girl in her position and I really hope he wasnt one of them.

Although the “really good guy” is noted, the narrator (male) is not even sure such a really good guy exists and he may, in reality, have been a “weird” person. The construction of the potential really good guy in this narrative removes the moral imperative of the narrator to check out what is going on and intervene. The narrative may want to position another as a “really good guy” so that the narrator doesn't have to step in.

The take charge woman

Many women who were bystanders positioned themselves as what we call a “take charge woman.” These narratives had a sensibility, not of heroism, but of taking charge and taking swift action. In these narratives the bystander reads the situation quickly and then becomes very purposeful. She knows what to do and does it:

I immediately surprised him and shoved him aside while he wasn't paying attention and took her away from the situation. Then I told some of my other friends to watch out for him for the rest of the night.

Sometimes she acts calmly and sometimes she doesn't, as in I “freaked out and grabbed her” or “I slapped that boy right across the face multiple times because my best friend had a boyfriend and I knew that she would never do this is [sic] she were sober.” In some situations, the take charge woman is very direct and removes the girl from the presence of the persistent guy. In others she insinuates herself in the situation in an awkward way, yet still insinuates herself. For example, she may pretend to be drunk or unaware of what is going on and literally plop herself down in the middle of a one-on-one conversation to save the girl and likely irritate the guy. For a guy to insinuate himself into the situation in this way or to take charge and remove the girl, he might be seen as a competitor, and this might lead to a confrontation. This may be why this subject position was more open to female bystanders.

The girlfriends

There were also “the girlfriends” who appeared in these narratives to many to have the primary responsibility to stop sexual assaults. Often the narrator noted whether a girl's friends were around, evoking an expectation that friends should watch out for other friends. Some narrators told stories of friends joining together to find, rescue, or recover a girl from a sketchy situation: “A bunch of us pulled her away,” “We circled her,” “We went looking for her.” As noted earlier in the discussion of the girl who is blameworthy, having friends at a party appears to morally redeem a girl no matter what situation she is in. There were no judgments on girls who could not say no or who drank too much when she had friends taking care of her.

Constructing regret

The way the research was designed there was a pull from participants to write about a time in which they intervened. Thus, the percentage of interveners' narratives vs non-interveners' narratives is of little relevance. But the statements made by non-interveners reveal subject positions regarding responsibility. Some participants indicated that others had stepped in and so there was no need to, or they wrote that the persistent aggressor had finally let the girl alone and there was no need for intervention. In one case there was no need because “the girl solved the problem by herself.” While some used the excuse of not knowing the individuals well enough to be able to assess the situation or to make it one's “business,” others thought that making it their business would put them in danger, e.g. “I did not intervene. The males were using extremely violent gestures and I did not want to escalate the situation.”

Bystanders who were not friends of the potential victim struggled with what was their moral obligation, and when they did not intervene they had regrets. Their regret focused primarily on the harm that might have befallen the girl. And in one poignant statement of responsibility, the word “allow” is used to condemn the bystander him/herself: “I did not intervene. I just simply watched and allowed for it to happen.” Another wrote, “Although I know I should've, I did not intervene.” In one alarming narrative, a person just gives up:

I went to see what was going on, there was a guy who was guarding the door and he refused to let me see passed [sic] the room. I heard loud noises and then I became alarmed so I pushed him and got into a confrontation. There was a girl being taken advantage of in the room, I didn't know what to do, I told my friend and decided to leave as things became hostile. To this day I still remember her face. I still feel guilty for not doing more.

In another a non-intervener wrote with regret, but also blamed the situation:

I didn't feel good about it because I was worried about the girls more, I feel like they are drunk, unconscious on what they were doing. I just wanted to tell my friends but that night was very so crowded and the music was too loud so no one could hear me at all.

What was interesting about these narratives of regret was that very few wrote about situations in which they did not know what to do.

Outliers

Discourse analysis asks researchers to pay attention to that which fits and doesn't fit into discursive constructions. With approximately 200 vignettes to analyse, the outliers stand out perhaps more saliently than in smaller samples. One outlier story was one in which the bystander assessed both guy and girl as “not in their senses” because of drinking, which was striking because in the entire sample, the guy's drunkenness was rarely used as an excuse for what he was doing and he was always positioned as agentic, taking advantage. His drinking was never assessed in the same way a girl's drinking was, as able to make him senseless or confused. That might be, however, because we asked participants to describe a “sketchy” situation and two drunk people may not mean “sketchy” to most.

Another outlier story was one in which the narrator, a woman, reflecting on a party she went to in high school, where girlfriends banded together to disrupt a potential perpetrator's attack on a girl they did not know well, wrote that she got the boy to call his parents to pick him up and take him home. This detail positions the perpetrator as just another kid, with parents, misbehaving at a party. It also shows the young woman as protecting the party and perhaps him. It was the only story in which “adults” were involved. In these stories parents, club managers, or landlords were rarely mentioned.

Discussion

In this discourse analysis of narratives of sketchy sexual situations, we have paid close attention not only to discursive objects but how they are positioned in the narrative. We examined the girl and the guy, and asked what subjective positions were permissible to the bystander/narrator, and what orientations towards action such positioning of themselves, the girl and the guy afforded them. In understanding which actions and practices are permitted via various discursive positions, it was hoped that such research might be helpful to those who would be designing programs to enhance bystander intervention.

After formulating the sketchy situation in a way that normalized the drinking, narrators documented the “sketchiness” via gut feelings, and noted the persistence of aggressors. Their constructions of the three discursive objects – the girl, the guy, and the bystander – and the variations in each of these positions served to encourage or discourage blame, and in so doing justify intervening or not intervening.

That drink and drunkenness were normalized is an important observation because this discursive act could serve many purposes. It could excuse a guy who was persistent, and yet it was not used in that way. A guy who was aggressive and persistent was almost always, except for in the one outlier narrative, presented as agentic, purposeful, and suspect. It was likely that in some of these situations the guy had been drinking as well, but his level of drunkenness was rarely included in the narrative. Drinking could, however, excuse a girl who was “allowing” exploitation; this excuse worked in some narratives and but not in others, echoing a vast literature attesting to the fine line women walk between sexual agent and slut in the eyes of onlookers (e.g. Armstrong, Hamilton, Armstrong, & Seeley, 2014; Hackman, Pember, Wilkerson, Burton, & Usdan, 2017). Normalizing drinking could also have excused the bystander, but only did so in narratives where the drunkenness of the girl made it confusing to know whether to step in, confusing in assessing her willingness to engage in whatever acts were occurring. The heavy focus on a nuanced reading of a girl's drunkenness may derive from two underlying perspectives: gender norms and the double standard regarding girls' sexual behaviour applied to drinking as well (that they are more likely to be judged for heavy drinking), and an ethical attitude based on autonomy and choice. In these neoliberal times, where individuals' choices are set apart from context and positioned as proof of empowerment, autonomy, and selfhood, interfering with that choice can feel as if it is a judgment on a woman's right to choose (Bay-Cheng, 2015).

While consent campaigns and university policies put forth the belief that a person cannot consent to sex if she has been drinking, our narratives show a much more nuanced assessment of drinking, and if campaigns and policies are to succeed, they may want to first make sense of the normalization of heavy drinking at parties and clubs.

With regard to “the girl,” she was positioned as either helpless, agentic, a confusing friend, or blameworthy (although extreme drunkenness or youthfulness could negate some of the blaming). The helpless girl positions male bystanders as heroes, and female bystanders as “take charge women.” Girls who have agency “allow” things to happen to them. Some are seen as able to take care of themselves, and some as “classless,” but in both of these cases the bystander is let off the hook. Agency as well as classlessness or promiscuity become qualities of being that excuse the bystander from assessing the situation overall. Having friends, or being someone's friend, was one of the most protected positions for the girl. But when the girl was a “confusing friend” bystanders expressed frustration, some intervening anyway, some staying on watch.

This is a problematic finding from an ethical perspective. Is there any justice to permitting someone who is not a friend to be exploited? Do only those girls within one's friendship circle deserve protection? Campaigns that focus on encouraging bystander intervention might do well to humanize the girl who is friendless at a party, depicting the girl who is alone as a girl who needs a friend.

Guys who were alone (friendless) were suspect in the narratives. The “stranger” at the party, the “weird” guy, was positioned as the guy to watch, the one who exploited and took advantage of drunk women. Guys presumably need friends too, to pull them off of drunk women, or to tell them when they are being too persistent. But this rarely happened in any narrative. When guys were featured in the narratives with friends, they were groping women together as they tried to pass them in crowded spaces, or they were looking on. In very few narratives was a guy the proverbial “cockblocker” to a friend, prioritizing a girl's safety over a guy's privilege.

This finding may support the need for bystander programs that address toxic masculinity, such as the Mentors in Violence program or Bringing in the Bystander. But it seems unlikely that “bro” culture (Banyard, Moynihan, & Plante, 2007; Katz, 1995) can be changed in one to four sessions (DeGue, 2014). And recent research shows that much sexual assault prevention falls on deaf ears for sexually aggressive men (Malamuth, Huppin, & Linz, 2018). Instead, it may be important for universities to use male friendships and male protection of other men in a way that builds on their connection to make each other better people and make aggression unacceptable. We are currently developing a bystander intervention program that frames lessons around ethics and is directed at “bro” culture. As in the one interesting vignette about the “really good guy,” where one man couldn't tell if another man was exploiting or helping a woman, there may be ways to signal to other guys what it means to be “really good.”

Finally, “bystanders” were the narrators, and excused their non-intervening in various ways that may support rape culture by blaming women or elevating the girls' abilities to make choices, even when such choices could end in great harm. Their attitudes reflected rape culture in another way as well, in their wariness of the “stranger” at the party. (Rape culture asserts that if we think of rape as committed primarily by strangers, we discount or make invisible the rapes perpetrated by men we know.)

It is clear from the number of individuals willing to write about sketchy sexual situations in which they did not intervene that, along with the excuse-making, there is a good deal of regret. Rather than take this affect at face value, we can ask what regret does and how it works in these narratives. Regret is a powerful emotion and, as such, the participants wrote poignantly about how they found themselves wondering, a long time after the event, if someone they could have helped got hurt. Regret, when confessed, is a form of absolution. But it also appeared in these stories as a way to show the researchers that the narrator had learned an important lesson. This lesson was never discussed in terms of their own character change or gendered awareness, but instead in terms of the harm to the victim. That someone could have prevented a harm and did not was the situation that produced regret.

The findings provide some insights for those who wish to expand the offerings of bystander intervention training. University warnings and policies about drinking may fall on deaf ears. And a focus on the stranger or “weird” guy at the party supports rape culture myths. We need to be addressing the nuances of what is presumed to be agency, empowerment, and choice, and ask whom does this neoliberal view serve? Expanding the notion of friendship, so that every girl at a party has a friend, and that guys protect other guys from harming others, may be an effective and persuasive rhetoric for students grappling with these situations. In this way, “the really good guy” and “the woman in charge” can transform the “outsider” into an intervener.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the assistance of several individuals in Dr. Lamb's research lab: Lindsey White, Madeline Brodt, Julie Koven, Lucia Jarkovska, Inga Schowengerdt.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a Healey Grant at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Sharon Lamb, Ed.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Counseling Psychology in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology at UMass Boston. Sharon has written, edited, and co-authored 10 books and co-authored numerous articles on girlhood, sexual development, and sexual victimization. She is a co-author of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force Report on the Sexualization of Girl. Her curriculum, the SECS-C (Sexual Ethics for a Caring Society Curriculum), , is used internationally. She also has a new curriculum on bystander interventions for first year college students, HABIT (Humane Acts Bystander Intervention Training), based on research on the ethical reasoning of bystanders who intervene in “sketchy” sexual situations.

Leah Attwell has finished her undergraduate degree in the School of Psychology at Plymouth University. She spent her “placement year” for her program pursuing research with Sharon Lamb at UMass Boston and studying qualitative research and morals, civics, and citizenship education at Harvard University Graduate School of Education with Helen Haste.

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