On Tuesday November 11, the Core Council hosted Coffee and Conversation, an event focused on the experiences of bystanders who witnessed bullying or harassment to members of the LGBQ community.

The night took place in the Living Learning Commons kitchen, during Enough is Enough Week, a nationwide campaign to promote peace and reducing violence across college campuses.

“We’ve all been in those situations where it’s like, ‘I see this is going on but I don’t want to get harassed, I don’t want to get yelled at, I don’t know that person well enough to get up in that bully’s face, but I want to be able to do something, so what?’” Joycelin Raho, co-chair of the Core Council, said.

Raho continued by adding that “We were hoping really to get together and talk about what it’s like to be a bystander. Some examples of how it made us feel when we didn’t do anything and we saw someone either we knew or didn’t know being harassed in some way.”

During the week leading up to the event, the Core Council asked students to submit their experiences anonymously via a Google Doc or by submitting it to the Core Council mailbox.

“We’re just looking for people to submit their experience as bystanders and how that made them feel, so that we can continue the conversation in a more public form,” Raho said.

The amount of stories submitted allowed for those that were found to be most relatable to be posted at Coffee and Conversation.

“We can talk about real life stories that our faculty and our students and our staff have experienced in their life, and use those stories to stem the conversation,” Raho said.

Among the questions discussed where: “what didn’t we do, what could we have done and what are the best ways to respond and to be helpful?”

“You don’t really report verbal assaults, or harassment or things being slid under your door that are harassing,” Raho said. “Those are all things that we’re not going to see in a campus safety report but are happening all over.”

“I myself have not seen a lot of harassment on this campus,” Raho’s co-chair and student body VP Mack Douglas said. “However, the few times I have seen harassment I have been impressed by the bystander who has stood up for the person that was being harassed. I think bullying and harassment is something that we all face one way or another in our own lives, and I think we can all do our part to help those that are affected by harassment.”

Raho added that “The Core Council is a support on campus for GLBQ students. I think it’s easy to be supporters when you like something on Facebook, but to physically be present, to say ‘yes, I have been a bystander, I have been a survivor, I want to be supportive to people who have been bystanders and didn’t know what to do.”