Haylee Carlyle

The Service Industry’s Solution to Sexual Violence in Boston By Haylee Carlyle “There’s a girl passed out in our bathroom.” Hillary was on the phone with 911. She was trained for emergencies as a social worker. But on this night, in the summer of 2016, she was a bartender at Night Shift Brewing. Hillary’s manager, Mariah, had unlocked a bathroom stall at the end of the night to find a woman unresponsive, on the toilet, slumped over. Mariah pulled the woman’s pants up before EMTs arrived with Everett police to get her in the ambulance. Maybe the woman had innocently overextended herself at the bar. But Hillary thought otherwise. Hillary was in grad school for social work at the time and worked with survivors of sexual assault. “I had worked in the restaurant industry for a while and I knew what drunk looked like,” she said in an email. “And I had interned at a drop-in center with a lot of folks who used IV drugs, but this was different. This girl was like a rag doll and she was scared, like she looked trapped inside of a body that didn’t work. This was what the survivors who I had worked with — who had been drugged — reported as symptoms.” When the staff conferred, one bartender said he had served her only two beers over the four to five hours she was at the bar. Surveillance footage showed the woman with a big group of people. Men were getting drinks from the bar and delivering them to her table, Hillary said. The evidence pointed to a drugging. Hillary had spent some time at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, where she learned about their assault response and prevention training programs. “I had mentioned to some of the management, ‘We do CPR training. Why don’t we do bystander training?’” she said. “My proposal was met with, ‘That’s a really good idea.’ But zero follow up.” The concept of intervention training in bars, restaurants and clubs has come out of the tactics that many bartenders and servers already use to take care of their guests. Haley Hamilton has been bartending in Boston for six years. She has worked in the Seaport, South End, Back Bay, Cambridge and is now at River Bar in Somerville, where she just finished a shift. She says she has been the only female bartender there for a while, and it’s often on her to be the watchdog for other women in the bar. She says her insight as a woman causes her to check in and follow up on other women’s safety, something she says her male co-workers don’t think to do. She recalled an incident when a man had waited until the end of the night, apparently to leave with a girl who Hamilton believed was drunk. “I told her, ‘You stay here until he’s gone.’ I was the only one working,” she said. After he left, Hamilton kept an eye on the woman as she walked out. “And sure enough, he came around the corner and followed her. I lost my mind,” she said. Her face flushes red when she tells the story. Hamilton intervened for a second time. “But what really scared me was that men don’t do that,” she said about recognizing the red flags that the men she works with do not. “Men don’t think to do that because they don’t have to.” A few of Boston’s service industry leaders are trying to change that. A sign reading “Active Bystander Workshop” is taped to the front door of an otherwise inconspicuous entrance to a bar in Central Square. It leads you through the unmarked door, up the stairs, and to the copper horseshoe bar that takes up half of Brick and Mortar. Compared to its dark, dingy-hip incarnation at night, the Brick and Mortar while sunlit is like Rihanna sans makeup, rare and surprising, yet refreshing. General Manager Jason Cool is providing the bar as training grounds for a few local service industry workers on a Tuesday afternoon. The open workshop is teaching participants, ranging from bartenders to managers to business owners, how to recognize and prevent sexual assault and harassment within alcohol-lubricated environments. It’s part of Boston’s V-Day series — originally one national fundraiser for groups fighting to end violence against women put on by chapters around the country. In Boston, V-Day was extended into weeks of networking activities and discussion. A few leaders in Boston’s bar scene, headed by Andrea Pentabona of The Independent bar in Somerville, decided to use the V-Day benefit to launch into a deeper conversation about sexual violence in the service industry. Mid-February in Boston was full of bartender competitions and industry meetups, all hosted by local harbingers. At the workshop in Brick and Mortar, attendees repeat the same portion of an anecdote before most stories: “He went to the bathroom, and then…” One bartender talks about how the intricacies of his bar layout allowed him, on more than one occasion, to sneak women who asked for his help out of a side door when their dates excused themselves. Another server mentions that when someone orders a drink for another person, she always confirms with the drink receiver that the drink is wanted and appropriate. “Alcohol is not a cause of sexual assault,” said Alex Levy. “It’s a tool aggressors use and that’s really important to talk about in the bar and restaurant industry. We are gatekeepers to so many of those interactions and alcohol is an essential part of what we do in bars and restaurants. Most bars talk about safe alcohol service. This is just a continuation of that conversation.” Eliza Campbell is the community engagement specialist at Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. She conducts training programs produced by BARCC on how to effectively spot and eliminate potential threats of sexual violence in the workplace. While BARCC doesn’t have a program specifically dealing with professions centered around alcohol use, they’ve just started to link up with out-of-state organizations that do. Campbell said that a recent influx in requests to BARCC for intervention training from employers in bars, restaurants, and music venues in Boston is reflective of the time. “All our services have been in high demand recently with the national coverage,” she said. Lauren Taylor is the co-founder and director of Safe Bars, a Washington, D.C.-based organization implementing bystander intervention training in bars, restaurants and clubs across the United States. She says learning about the concept of targeting alcohol-serving employees for intervention training — that is, teaching people who witness harassment or assault to effectively intervene — was a revelation. “It was like a light bulb,” she said. “We’re building on the skills that people have in hospitality anyhow, which is being able to notice if someone’s having a good time or not. You can tell if someone doesn’t like their meal or doesn’t like their drink before you go over to say, ‘How’s everything?’” She wants to apply the same skills to spotting danger. Taylor says that college-aged people are in the age group most likely to be sexually assaulted. Inside Boston’s 48 square miles, there are 29 colleges and universities. That number goes up to 50 when schools within a 10-mile radius, such as Harvard and Tufts, are included. As an effect, 15 percent of Boston Proper’s total ​population​ is made up of people aged 18 to 24. Comparatively, this age range makes up just 9 percent of America’s total ​population​. At least half of all reported sexual assaults on college students ​involve alcohol​, according to a study out of Wayne State University published in 2002. Yet Boston lags behind cities that have implemented bystander prevention training in their bars; places like D.C., Denver, Philadelphia, Nashville, and the ​entire state of Ohio​. Naomi Levy, a consulting bartender with Kimpton Hotels and brand ambassador for Bols Genever gin, brought Safe Bar Collective to Boston to collaborate with BARCC on a 2-hour active bystander workshop for the V-Day series. “We’re focusing on prevention. There’s a nice core group of six to 10 of us [in the service industry] who got involved and said, ‘Let’s organize something,” Levy said. Her brother Alex Levy is part of Collective Action for Safe Spaces, a grassroots organization based in D.C. that aims to create communities free of sexual assault and harassment. Their facet of bar-specific intervention training is called Safe Bars Collective, not to be confused with Safe Bars, also based in D.C. Alex Levy has worked in bars and restaurants for six years. “A lot of the training that I received when I was just getting started was about safe service of alcohol, when it’s OK to cut someone off, when to throw someone out,” he said. “It was less about creating a culture in which guests are feeling safe and feeling comfortable.” In Haley Hamilton’s eight years as a bartender, she has never worked at a bar where there was an explicit policy around harassment prevention. “It’s just kind of like, ‘Don’t let anybody get out of hand.’ It’s not discussed how you interact with that,” she said. But that does not keep seasoned bartenders from implementing their own tactics for intervention. Hamilton said when she feels things are getting weird, “I’ll wait until he steps away and I’ll lean in and say, ‘I just want to make sure you’re having a good time and everything is OK over here.’ And if they’re good, I’m good. But I say, ‘If that changes, ask me for a screwdriver.’ Nobody orders screwdrivers anymore. And I will know right away that I need to step in.” The skill of recognizing violent potential in behavior could also be used to prevent internal harassment in the industry, an increasingly discussed issue. The service industry, like many others, is rife with​ sexual assault claims​. And as the Boston Globe reported​ in November​, Boston is not a safe space for food service workers. And if it’s not safe for them, it’s not safe for anyone. Lindsay Donovan is a taproom manager at Turtle Swamp Brewing in Jamaica Plain who worked previously at Harpoon and Night Shift Brewing. She claims during her time at another bar, a manager mishandled a formal complaint she made against another bartender who harassed her regularly. “He would follow me around while I was bussing tables and demand that I talk to him at work about our non-relationship,” she said. When she got a boyfriend, Donovan said the harassment escalated. “One night, he came up to me while I was at the bar drinking and in front of other managers, a few of the owners, was like ‘You know everyone hates you, right?’ and cornered me. I was actually in a corner and he was just degrading me, trying to make me feel like shit. And I was stunned. I was like, ‘We’re at work.’” She spoke to a manager about the situation, because the company has no human resources department. The manager made Donovan’s colleague apologize to her and there was no further action taken, including any sort of documentation of the complaint. Donovan left the bar soon after and said the manager has since been let go for unrelated reasons. “The craft beer industry is so white male-dominated. I think that has a lot to do with it,” she said. “That was unchartered territory for them to deal with. Because they’re so new, too.” The accommodation and food service industry accounted for 14 percent of all harassment claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 2005 and 2015, the most of all industries. The Center for American Progress published these ​findings​ in 2017 based on data from the EEOC. “[Bar staff] are bystanders to so much. It’s happening right in front of us eight to 12 hours a day,” said Naomi Levy. “For us, changing that culture, changing what that means, that it’s not about ​being tough​; it’s about, this is unacceptable.” Levy says her work with colleagues to make a Safe Bar Coalition in Boston is still in its infancy. “The goal is to have a group of trainers at the ready here in Boston that are focused on training bars and restaurants. Then, creating some sort of certification through a list online, whether it’s through something they can put on the door, a sticker, something they can put on a menu that says, ‘Hey, we did this thing.’” To critics who contend there are no safe spaces in the real world, the Levys say there are no safe spaces if we’re not actually creating them. Alex Levy said, “You can sit back and lament that no one’s going to feel safe, or you can get up and do something about it.”