BREWER, Maine — Though prompted in part by the upcoming Women’s March on Washington — a protest set for Jan. 21, the day after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration — a pair of training sessions on Sunday provided anti-harassment skills that could be applied anywhere from public places to the family dinner table.
The two sessions, held at the headquarters of Food AND Medicine on Ivers Street, drew nearly 70 participants.
The Bystander Intervention Training program was provided by Clara Porter and Maeve Porter-Holliday of Prevention.Action.Change., a Portland-based organization that works to counter harassment and assault through a variety of strategies, including verbal and physical skills.
“We are really focused on helping people reduce their risk and learn how to respond in the face of violence for themselves or someone else,” Porter said.
She said the emphasis of Sunday’s workshop was on identity-based harassment, or harassment based on who one is perceived to be by others.
In Maine, Porter said, recent targets of harassment have included immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community.
“Really we’re focusing on this because there has been an extreme increase in this country of this kind of harassment since the election and leading up to the election,” she said. “There’s been a lot of documentation on that.”
The point of the training was to arm participants with tactics they can use to stop harassment and violence aimed at themselves or others and “send a message that this kind of action and this kind of behavior is not acceptable in our community,” Porter said.
Topics covered included direct, indirect and distraction-based methods of intervention intended to de-escalate volatile situations through the use of assertive communication, facial expressions, body language and tone of voice.
Participants got to test their anti-harassment skills during a series of group exercises and by role playing in a range of situations, including being ridiculed for wearing a T-shirt with a slogan that others find offensive and divisive political remarks made during a family gathering.
Mary Ann Harlan of Bangor was among those who took part.
“I’m going to be traveling in airports in three states in the next two months, and I’ll be in all those public places,” Harlan said.
“I participated in demonstrations when I was 18 in the desegregation of Washington, D.C. [in the 1940s],” she said.
Such demonstrations were not well received at the time, Harlan recalled.
Because of all the embassies in the cosmopolitan city, “a black person with a beret and a French accent could get into any restaurant, any hotel, any theatre,” she said. But “a black American couldn’t do any of those things.
“We’ve had a racial incident here in town. We’re not immune from it locally,” Harlan added.
While Gerry Gross, who also took part, said she hasn’t personally witnessed harassment in the area, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen here.
“With the current rhetoric and national politics, it’s kind of given [some people] permission to speak hatefully, and so I just want to be sure that I’m aware of what’s going on and have some resources and some strategies to deal with them if I should [encounter] harassment,” she said.
The workshops were presented by the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine, The Health Equity Alliance, Food AND Medicine, the Bangor Racial and Economic Justice Coalition and Women’s March on Washington–Bangor.