In one of its featured “Post-Election Discussion” safe spaces for students upset by Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. Presidential election, University of Illinois’ Gender and Women’s Studies House held “Bystander Intervention/De-Escalation Training” last week taught by a self-described “radical queer feminist activist.”
Rachel Sarah Blum Levy, a New York-based bookstore manager turned social worker, conducted the training for safe space visitors, scheduled for two hours last Wednesday over Skype.
On its Facebook page, the Gender and Women’s Studies Department wrote that the trainings are “so we can do as much as possible to protect black, brown and Muslim bodies under siege with our bodies."
“(We) stand in solidarity with those peoples and populations targeted by the violence promised by the incoming federal administration --including dispossession, deportation, and disenfranchisement-- and by those who mimic that violence in our “everyday,” read the post.
“Both Intervention and de-escalation offer a set of tools which can be employed to assertively calm down a potentially volatile situation,” said a University announcement of Levy’s training. “Verbal assertiveness can be used as a preventative measure, whereas verbal de-escalation is for situations that are already getting out of control.”
“Bystander intervention” is a popular topic at American universities, where students are increasingly concerned with being aggrieved.
In August, Wesleyan University President Michael Roth cited the principles of bystander intervention in calling upon educators to rise up and stop Trump from winning the presidency.
“When we teach students the skills for bystander intervention, we want them to feel empowered to make our campuses safer, more humane places,” Roth wrote. “Donald Trump is a developing calamity for our polity.”
Levy’s qualifications for teaching conflict resolution techniques are somewhat unclear.
A 2009 graduate of Goucher College in suburban Baltimore, Levy is a currently a social worker with Planned Parenthood, where she has worked for just three months, according to Linkedin. For the past year, she has also been a “Patient Navigator” for Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital.
Levy previously managed a Bluestockings, a feminist bookstore on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, worked as a day camp counselor and held a series of internships.
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