Black Youth Empowerment (BYE)

History of BYE

Project Respect, a division of the Victoria Sexual Assault Centre’s Prevention Program, and the Girls and Femmes with Afro-textured Hair (Victoria, BC), began a collaboration in September 2020. The goal was to introduce Black Youth in high school, in Victoria, to program content from Project Respect.

The Black Youth Empowerment (BYE) group consists of six high school students who in winter 2020 began reviewing program content on bystander intervention from the Project Respect program.  The focus of the group is to ensure that the information about bystander intervention is culturally relevant. The primary question they are answering is, “How does the content resonate with the group’s Black identities and experiences?”

Workshop Development

Over the last few years, BYE has developed a bystander intervention workshop made by Black youth for Black youth, as well as a Safer/ Braver Spaces workshop for adults who work with youth. From the various topics, BYE selected Bystander Intervention as a presentation topic. Conversations include the definitions of a bystander and intervention, the types of bystanders and the various interventions. A recurring question for us is, “Thinking about our embodied selves and the idea of intersectionality, what factors might influence how people respond to us when we intervene in a situation, instead of being a bystander?” The flip side to that question is, “What issues might influence people’s reaction towards us when we are the victim of a situation?”