Oregon City Students Engage in Bystander Invention in Response to Racism

Students at Oregon City High School organized a walk-out in response to racial violence within the student body that was brought to light by picture tweeted on Monday.  Incidents like this are not isolated to single individuals, nor to Oregon City High School. Discrimination based on gender, race, class, ability is something that each and every community must face and Clackamas Women’s Services sends our support to students in our community as they address this issue.

Rob Manning/OPB

As part of  Violence Prevention Education that Clackamas Women’s Services provides to Health classes (at OCHS and beyond), we talk to students about how to be active bystanders when they witness incidences of violence or oppression.  We talk about how verbal violence is still a form of violence, and how it can be just as impactful to those who experience it as physical violence.  We define oppression and discuss how systems like our education system, legal system, and media contribute and maintain oppression. And we help students practice ways that they can be active bystanders. Just three weeks before this incident, our Violence Prevention Educators watched some amazing students perform skits where they practiced intervention skills, identifying and condemning different types of oppression-based violence.

In our bystander intervention lesson, we reference the following quote from Dr. Martin Luther King: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  We hope that students remember this as a time in their high school careers when people came together and lifted their voices in support of victims of violence. We are proud of students at Oregon City for organizing and speaking out rather than standing by silently, and for setting forth a standard of peace and safety that they demand of their peers.

The conversation will not end today, but we are confident the students and administrators at Oregon City High School have the skills to center this discussion and the students affected, to shine a light on it, and to continue to learn as a community. We believe knowledge is power; and by increasing knowledge of oppression and bystander intervention among young people we are setting ourselves up for the future free from violence that we envision at Clackamas Women’s Services.