Advocacy, Education, and Prevention
The R-VOICE Center provides confidential, trauma-informed support for students impacted by sexual or relationship violence, stalking, harassment, or similar harm. At the same time, R-VOICE leads education and prevention initiatives that help students understand consent, recognize harmful behavior, and learn how to look out for one another. Our goal is simple: create a campus where every student feels safe, supported, and empowered.
Confidential Support When You Need It
If you’ve experienced harm—or are worried about a friend—you can talk with a confidential advocate to get emotional support, explore options, and identify next steps that feel right for you. Advocates listen without judgment and help you regain a sense of safety and control.
Prevention and Education
The R-VOICE Center provides campuswide education that helps students recognize, prevent, and respond to interpersonal violence. Through conversations about healthy relationships, warning signs of abuse, bystander intervention, and how to support someone who discloses harm, students build the skills to communicate clearly, act with empathy, and contribute to a safer, more respectful community.
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R-VOICE offers interactive workshops for student organizations, classes, and campus partners who want to build safer, more informed communities. Whether you’re looking to explore healthy relationships, consent, trauma-informed support, or prevention strategies, our team can tailor a session to meet your group’s needs.
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The Ambassador Training Series equips staff and faculty with the knowledge and confidence to support students impacted by power-based interpersonal violence. Through foundational skills and trauma-informed education, participants learn how to respond with care, challenge harmful behaviors, and strengthen supportive pathways within their own units. This series helps build a campus community where students feel seen, believed, and connected to resources.
Ambassador Training – Level 1: Foundations
The R-VOICE Center Ambassador Series is a way for staff and faculty to take on a leadership role in their own units and to be a bridge to the R-VOICE Center for students. As our flagship training series for staff and faculty, this two-part series includes a variety of techniques, education, and understanding on how we each can learn how to better support students, get them connected with critical resources, and learn more about how trauma affects survivors.
Ambassador Training – Level 1 – Foundations is a two-hour training where participants learn practical skills on how they can be a resource to a survivor of power-based interpersonal violence, how to help them in times of crisis, what to say, and how to connect them with the R-VOICE Center. Additionally, Ambassadors will become a source of information for their coworkers, learn practical techniques on how to address victim-blaming behavior, and learn bystander intervention skills.
Ambassador Training – Level 2: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Students
For staff and faculty who want to take their Ambassador status to the next level, they can attend Ambassador Training – Level 2 – A Trauma Informed Approach to Supporting Students: Understanding the Neurobiology and Impact of Trauma. If you have ever wondered why a good student is suddenly having difficulty with your course or is struggling to come to work, then attend this two-hour workshop and learn how to help, understand, and support survivors and victims of trauma, and not retraumatize them in the process.
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R-VOICE Peer Educators help shift campus culture by leading conversations about healthy relationships, consent, boundaries, and preventing harm. Students who join build facilitation skills, deepen their understanding of interpersonal violence, and play an active role in strengthening Penn State’s community of care.
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Greeks CARE is a collaborative, peer-led initiative that empowers fraternity and sorority members to build safer, healthier chapter communities. Through workshops, discussions, and skill-building activities, students learn how to prevent harm, support one another, and take active steps to strengthen the culture of care within their organizations. It’s a shared commitment to leadership, accountability, and the well-being of every member.
Active Bystander Skills and Supporting Survivors
Learning how to intervene safely and support survivors helps create a campus culture rooted in care, accountability, and shared responsibility. Active bystander strategies and survivor-centered support tools offer practical ways to respond to harm, interrupt inappropriate behavior, and provide compassion and validation to those who have been impacted.
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The 3Ds—Direct, Distract, and Delegate
Effective bystander intervention using the 3Ds—Direct, Distract, and Delegate—empowers individuals to safely address harmful or inappropriate situations when they witness them.
- Direct intervention involves clearly and calmly addressing the behavior in the moment, setting boundaries, or checking in with the person being harmed when it feels safe to do so.
- Distract means interrupting the situation without confrontation, such as changing the subject, creating a reason to step away, or drawing attention elsewhere to de-escalate tension.
- Delegate focuses on seeking help from others—friends, coworkers, authority figures, or trained staff—especially when the situation feels unsafe or overwhelming.
Together, the 3Ds emphasize that bystanders have multiple options to intervene, prioritize safety, and contribute to a culture of shared responsibility and respect.
The Breath of Fresh AIR Technique
The Breath of Fresh AIR technique is a bystander intervention strategy that promotes thoughtful, non-escalating responses to harmful behavior by creating a pause and encouraging reflection.
- Acknowledge (A) involves directly naming the statement, behavior, or harm and interrupting it with questions such as “What did you just say?”, “Why do you feel that is appropriate?”, or “What do you mean by that?” to signal that the behavior is not acceptable.
- Inform (I) focuses on explaining how the language or action causes harm, why the belief behind it is inaccurate or rooted in bias, and why it is problematic, centering impact rather than intent.
- Reframe (R) encourages the person to shift their perspective and consider more respectful alternatives, helping them think about how they can respond or speak differently in the future.
Together, these steps create space for accountability, learning, and behavior change while prioritizing safety and respect.
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If someone tells you they’ve experienced harm, your response matters. Creating a supportive space means listening without judgment, believing their experience, and allowing them to stay in control of what happens next. Avoid pushing them to report or take action unless that’s what they want.
Supporting survivors using the ABCs—Acknowledge, Believe, and Check In—centers care, validation, and ongoing support.
- Acknowledge means recognizing the survivor’s experience and the courage it takes to share, affirming that what they went through matters.
- Believe involves trusting their account without questioning, minimizing, or placing blame, which helps restore a sense of dignity and safety that harm often disrupts.
- Check In emphasizes continued support by asking what they need, respecting their choices, and following up over time rather than treating support as a one-time response.
Learn, Engage, and Build a Safer Penn State
R-VOICE hosts workshops, trainings, and events that help students grow as allies, advocates, and leaders in prevention. Students can attend programs focused on consent education, bystander intervention, healthy relationships, and creating supportive communities.
Advocacy Opportunities
The Clothesline Project
This national campaign provides survivors and supporters a powerful way to share their stories through color-coded t-shirts displayed on a clothesline. Each shirt honors a survivor’s experience or memory and brings awareness to the impacts of interpersonal violence.
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Campus community members are encouraged to participate in the R-VOICE Virtual Clothesline Project but submitting a t-shirt template to display words of support for survivors, stories of personal experiences, or messages taking a stand against power-based personal violence.
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Shirts are color-coded to highlight the form of violence and type of violence experienced by the individual making the shirt or experienced by the individual who the shirt is made in honor of. See the color code below:
- White: People who died as a result of violence
- Yellow: Survivors of physical assault and/or dating/domestic violence or abuse
- Red: Survivors of rape and/or sexual assault
- Pink: Survivors of rape and/or sexual assault
- Orange: Survivors of rape and/or sexual assault
- Blue: Survivors of incest or childhood sexual abuse
- Green: Survivors of incest or childhood sexual abuse
- Purple: Survivors of attacks due to perceived or actual sexual orientation
- Brown: Survivors of emotional, spiritual, or verbal abuse
- Grey: Survivors of emotional, spiritual, or verbal abuse
- Black: Those disabled as the result of an attack or assaulted because of a disability
“What Were You Wearing?” Survivor Art Installation
This powerful installation confronts the victim-blaming question too often asked of survivors by displaying clothing replicas and survivor accounts from the Penn State community. Originally inspired by Dr. Mary Simmerling’s poem, the exhibit makes visible the reality that no outfit invites violence.