Bartenders were quick to stop a lecherous man’s advances on a woman sitting alone in a bar at ChurchKey in Washington, D.C., last week.
She seemed uncomfortable when he put his arm around her. So when he tried to kiss her, one of the bar managers said, “Don’t you think you’re getting a little aggressive there?” The bartenders checked with the woman while he was in the bathroom. She said she “was not really interested but didn’t know how to get out of the situation,” according to the manager. The staff helped her go out the back door and get a cab before he came back. She called later to thank them.
What happened at ChurchKey that night was bystander intervention ― and it may have prevented a sexual assault, said Jessica Raven, the executive director of the advocacy group Collective Action for Safe Spaces.
The organization had trained the ChurchKey bartenders through their Safe Bars program, run with Defend Yourself, another local empowerment group.
Raven’s group is now working on training more watering holes around the D.C. area and teaching organizations in other cities, like Philadelphia, how to launch programs similar to Safe Bars.
[For more of this story, written by Tyler Kingkade, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...e412e4b01edea78ef4df]
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