Mike DomitrzPresident, Author, and Speaker on Respect, The Center for Respect, Inc. · Author & Speaker on Respect for Schools, Corporations, & the Military since 1990 (has reached

You need to listen to your own excuses to hear how they actually sound.

2 Aug 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker probes the reasons why students often refrain from intervening in situations like sexual assault. He identifies key excuses—fear of standing out, embarrassment, and concern for personal reputation—and describes them as "brutal" self‑justifications. He urges listeners to vocalize these excuses to hear their harshness, thereby confronting and rejecting them, which can motivate taking the correct, intervention‑oriented action.

Chapters

Give me reasons you think more students don't intervene. Not you personally, but just why more people don't intervene in these scenes. What do you think are the reasons for this? They don't want to stand out. Yes, this is a critical one. Like, I might be embarrassed, right, if I try to intervene. So that's all I want everybody to pause on this and think for a second. I'm not going to intervene because it might embarrass me. They are literally saying out loud, I'm not going to stop a rape because it might hurt my reputation. By the way, if you agree that sounds brutal, just say brutal. Brutal. We got to say out loud to ourselves sometimes our own excuses so we can hear how brutal they are. That's not who we are. If you say that out loud to yourself, you're going to literally go, that's not who I am. Why am I talking this way? And then we'll recognize I want to do the right thing. We'll take the right action. But that is a major one.