I am coordinating a statewide survey of bars and other ASEs in Ohio.
An ASE is an alcohol-serving establishment.
In partnership with the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence and with support from the Ohio Department of Health, I have been working with a committee of prevention advocates from different regions of the state to gather insight about “bar culture” from the field. Our long-term goal is to develop a unified, statewide approach to preventing harassment and aggression in alcohol-serving establishments (ASEs), better known as bars, clubs, breweries, wineries, etc.
The purpose of our initial data collection is to assess existing readiness for sexual violence prevention in this segment of the service industry, where efforts to address sexual violence have been bubbling up. The Ohio Bar Project is consistent with work happening nationwide, including in Washington, DC and Arizona — as well as in many communities here in Ohio. This year has seen high-profile partnerships formed, effectiveness research funded, and multiple podcasts recorded, all encouraging bar owners, employees, and patrons to play an active role in ending sexual violence in places where people go to have a good time.
In a career centered on the issue of sexual violence, my work is usually pretty personal. The way I ask a research question is grounded in not only the empirical literature, but in life experiences. This project, and the end of the year, has me reflecting on times I’ve spent in bars, clubs, and other ASEs.
Bar work funded my early college days. The summer before I left for college, I joined some of the (at the time) hardest-working and best-paid valets, bartenders, and servers in Cleveland as a busser at the Watermark. After leaving the Cleveland area and arriving on campus, I got a job slinging $2 pitchers of Old Milwaukee and really, really good bar fries at the steamy, crowded Gathering Place — also known as the G-Spot and the Bar — which emerged, after 5 PM, from reconfigured cafeteria tables in the basement of the student union (this party was good while it lasted!).
After I hung up my bar mop for a whistle on a lanyard, the local bar facilitated payday bonding with my fellow Edgewater Beach lifeguards. When the shift was over, we’d pack the umbrellas and megaphones into the guard house, and head over to the neighborhood tavern where the staff would cash our paychecks from the register behind the bar. Remembering those carefree, summer happy hours vests me in our current efforts to remove harassment and sexual aggression from similar neighborhood gathering places in communities across Ohio.
Bar-based sexual prevention work might be personal to you, too. How have you traveled in and out of ASEs over the course of your life? What special people have you met in places like this? What great music have you heard? What networking and business have you done? What milestones have you celebrated? If you are a regular at a particular Ohio-based ASE, and can comment on its qualities, you can participate in our survey by clicking here.
In my life, ASEs have been the settings of surprise birthday parties, dissertation and thesis defense throw-downs, post-funeral celebrations of lives taken too soon; and, in 2019, the victory grounds for team trivia with family and friends. Visceral sensations of lighting, smell, background sound, and the bustling energy of these spaces are closely associated with my recall of critical conversations with friends and family about transitions that have brought pain and loss: terminating pregnancies that were derailing lives, ending relationships that were doing more harm than good; and, in 2019, planning to move my mom to a memory care facility.
But, as special as these places are….
… sexual violence is a problem in ASEs. Sexual aggressors travel in and out of these spaces, too. While my reflection has focused on mostly the positive aspects of bars as gathering places, I am too keenly aware of alcohol-and-drug-facilitated sexual assault.
When I was a volunteer rape victim advocate in 1990’s Chicago, I met a young woman who was having a rape kit examination conducted in the ER, while her fiancé alternated between classic shock paralysis in the waiting room and classic anger outbursts on the sidewalk outside the hospital. The couple had been on a getaway weekend when they got into a fight in their Michigan Avenue hotel room. One of the two had stormed out. The woman ended up alone at a bar, where two men approached her — one from each side — took her under the arms and carried her, stumbling, to an apartment where they repeatedly raped her. A unforgettable detail of her assault was that, while she lay on the bed bleeding, one of two men threw a box of tampons at her. She kept asking me about this: did I think his doing this meant he had a girlfriend? Did this gesture make him more human? Why did it make her feel like an animal? What were they doing with a box of tampons anyway? The survivor tested positive for Rohypnol; and her assault was my first experience with the “date rape drug.”
While every incident is different, sexual aggression in bars is not uncommon. The Ohio Bar Project seeks to better understand the context and culture of these community settings in order to develop next steps in addressing and preventing this form of sexual violence. We could use your help.
If you live in Ohio, and are a bar owner — or know one — the image you see below has been designed as a print flyer to be hung in bathrooms in ASEs to invite participate in our survey. Email me at ohiobarproject@oaesv.org if you’d like pdf copies to distribute in your community.
The survey will be open through January 10th, 2020.
If you have social media following in Ohio, email me at ohiobarproject@oaesv.org if you would like to post a version of the image below on your accounts.
Without asking for any names, the survey poses a series of questions to better understand the extent to which sexual aggression, upstander culture, and other possible solutions exist — or can be developed — in Ohio’s ASEs.
In the fields of community psychology and public health, the focus is often on universal solutions to widespread threats to health. The unit of analysis is often at the group — or setting — level, as opposed to the individual level. And that is true in this survey, too. The survey engages individual respondents as “expert informants,” who can provide insight into the nature of these community spaces where friends and strangers come together and connect to eat, drink, make music; laugh, cry, dance and sing; commiserate and celebrate — whether it be the “big day” or the “big game.”
Things to know about the survey:
It is anonymous. No names of individuals or establishments are collected.
Respondents can skip questions or stop taking the survey at any time.
We are using a snowball approach/convenience sample to hear from a wide range of Ohioans who are familiar with bar culture.
It is brief and exploratory. We are not testing hypotheses or publishing findings.
It is statewide, and results will be aggregated by region.
It is part of a larger project, and results will be used by an Advisory Committee to develop next steps in statewide prevention efforts.
I want to acknowledge that bar-based sexual violence prevention work, similar to campus-based sexual violence prevention work, has initially focused on relatively affluent, privileged, and White communities. There is a great need for cultural humility as we develop next steps, so that we can center solutions that work in all communities adversely affected by sexual violence. If you have ideas on how to make this work more relevant in your community, please contact me at ohiobarproject@oaesv.org
Look out for each other as you celebrate the upcoming new year!
