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Allyship in Action

Nagoya Action Heroes,a group of high school students who were inspired by the Blank Noise community/public art project that seeks to confront sexual harassment, facilitated their first session of a tree-part workshop series with undergraduate students of Aichi Prefectural University on tackling attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate a culture of sexual violence in intimate and public spaces. This part of the workshop series was entirely focused on consent and the five stages of consent, victim-blaming attitudes, and bystander interventions to support survivors of sexual harassment. Young people had the opportunity to understand what consent looks like for both heterosexual partners and LGBTQIA+ folks. It was brilliant to watch them use a variety of teaching strategies to facilitate a dialogue around chikan. There were Japanese-speaking Action Heroes at each discussion table who explained key terms in both English & Japanese -- such as consent, victim blaming and so on. Throughout the discussion, they code-switched between these languages with skill and confidence. It was incredible to see young adults dismantling the patriarchy piece by piece.