Reply to ""Active Skill Building" AND well researched "advice and information"?"
Former Member
Story of Moving Upstream “I am standing by the shore of a swiftly flowing river and hear the cry of a drowning man. I jump into the cold waters. I fight against the strong current and force my way to the struggling man. I hold on hard and gradually pull him to shore. I lay him out on the bank and revive him with artificial respiration. Just when he begins to breathe, I hear another cry for help. I jump into the cold waters. I fight against the strong current, and swim forcefully to the struggling woman. I grab hold and gradually pull her to shore. I lift her out onto the bank beside the man and work to revive her with artificial respiration. Just when she begins to breathe, I hear another cry for help. I jump into the cold waters. Fighting again against the strong current, I force my way to the struggling man. I am getting tired, so with great effort I eventually pull him to shore. I lay him out on the bank and try to revive him with artificial respiration. Just when he begins to breathe, I hear another cry for help. Near exhaustion, it occurs to me that I'm so busy jumping in, pulling them to shore, applying artificial respiration that I have no time to see who is upstream pushing them all in....” (Adapted from a story told by Irving Zola as cited in McKinlay, John B. "A case for refocusing upstream: The political economy of illness." In Conrad and Kern, 2nd edition, 1986, The Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical Perspectives. pp. 484-498.) Quoted on Page 5
I like to give this classic public health primary prevention story a twist that focuses the primary prevention parable into one that is specifically perpetration prevention-oriented. Since sexual violence is not a crime or situation of the victim "falling into the river" but being "pushed into the river" I tell it that the "rescuer" goes upstream to the head of the river to figure out who is pushing the people in and why. This "rescuer" deals with the perpetrators by holding them accountable and ensuring that they receive treatment and attention to stop the harmful behavior of pushing people into the river to drown. (Alisa Klein)"Suppose you are standing next to a river, and you see someone drowning as she floats downstream. You jump into the river and pull her ashore. As soon as you've done that, you see another person in trouble, again floating downstream, and you rescue him as well. Every time you've saved one person, you see another, and another. After you've dragged another drowning body out of the river, you're thoroughly exhausted and you know you don't have the energy to save one more person, so instead you decide you must go upstream to find out what is causing these people to end up in the river. You want to address this problem at its source. You get upstream, and see a bridge. Upon careful inspection, you find that there is a well-concealed, yet sizeable hole in this bridge that is causing people to fall in. What do you do? You do what makes the most sense - you work to repair the bridge. Primary prevention means "going upstream" and repairing the bridge before more people fall through this hole. Too often we just focus on the tangible aftermath of a problem. We just keep pulling people out of the river - we set up systems to support people directly affected by sexual violence. While these systems of support are crucial, we also need to cultivate complementary systems that get to the core of the violence, stopping it from ever happening in the first place. We need to become proactive, go upstream to that bridge, study it, determine what resources we need to repair it, and start doing the long and hard work of primary prevention. For sexual violence, it means examining and changing individual attitudes that lead to patterns of relating that create norms that shape the institutions in our society that allow sexual violence to thrive. Addressing these underlying factors is all the more difficult because they are intertwined with the identity of our society. Rigid gender roles, male entitlement, and glorification of disrespect play major roles in our society in the same way that the bridge is central to the culture of its nearby communities." The key thing about this version that I've found useful is the metaphor of a "well-concealed, yet sizeable hole" in the bridge to represent the factors in our society that help support sexual violence and yet seem/are so commonplace. So I guess this version might be more geared toward trying to get those "big picture" factors across to folks, whereas other versions of this story - where you go upstream and find someone pushing people in - might work better for exposing factors that are at a more individual level. In my expanded version of this story, there actually is a group of privileged folks who live near the bridge (the "Bridgies") who receive a greater proportion of the toll revenue from the bridge and have a far greater knowledge of the bridge structure itself. As such, Bridgies have a strong interest in extolling the virtues of the bridge and promoting its use (which sometimes includes minimizing the danger of the hole) so as to keep their "superiority" intact. Holding the Bridges accountable to come clean and repair the bridge then becomes a major goal. (Brad Perry, Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance ) Excerpted from http://www.vahealth.org/civp/sexualviolence/Moving%20Upstream.pdf
Our organization assigns a different duty to the rescuer, and furnishes him with some interesting "supplies." Here's our twist: When Alisa's rescuer arrives upstream he finds it is far from evident who is doing the pushing. After all, being "in the river" means the victim has already been terrorized into lifetime silence. They're not available to point out offenders. Dr. Carla Van Dam's new book proposes useful categories of offender as Groomers and Grabbers. The clumsy Grabbers get spotted and their pushing is stopped. The clever Groomers don't get spotted, and their pushing continues. Our Secondary Prevention approach is inspired by the "Van Dam Plan" and focuses on reducing that splash-count. It equips the rescuer with supplies of inconspicuous life preservers the children wear to assure survival in case they are pushed, and with foolproof single-use "magic gloves" the adults have to wear. The gloves light up when a push occurs, but they cost $300 a pair. Lacking budget, the rescuer has mostly fake ten-cent gloves which don't light up but look exactly like the ones that do. Quite a few, however, are genuine and really work. New gloves are issued every day, so the undetectable Groomers are forced to play Russian roulette with their pushing. It is such a high-stakes game for them that the Groomers use their cunning to find benign-sounding excuses for dropping-out. (Let's hope they voluntarily "drop-in" to one of Alisa's progressive treatment clinics on the way.) Magic gloves? We have 'em. But you can't just buy the ten-cent version, otherwise who would even believe in them? (David Allburn, Safe Harbor Resources)
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