As the Alaska Folk Festival approaches, so does a big spike in activity at downtown bars.
With that comes concerns about drink safety. Two people in Juneau who work to prevent sexual assault in different ways say it’s everyone’s responsibility to look out for each other.
Tawney Letterman has served drinks at bars for 16 years. She said there’s a possibility people could be drugged and assaulted when they go out.
“I definitely think that there should be a world where people are allowed to walk away from their drinks. Do we exist in that world? Probably not,” she said. “There’s really insidious people out there, and they walk among us.”
Letterman is a manager at Devil’s Club Brewing now, but she said she has always made sure bartenders she works with see themselves as responsible for preventing those kinds of attacks. That means paying attention to the crowd and keeping an eye out for unprotected drinks and unsafe behavior.
“When I was bartending, I was always really cognizant of the same person coming up and getting drinks for like, one specific person,” Letterman said. “So much to the fact that I would go out of my way to go to that person and be like, ‘Hey, are you consenting to these drinks? Like, do you want this drink?’”
She wants to remind people that they can always reject a drink someone offers them, even if it may feel rude or wasteful.
“I am not going to give a drink to a person who is not consenting,” Letterman said. “This is a substance that can be and is dangerous.”
And if someone notices something weird or a person is making them uncomfortable, Letterman said they ought to tell the bartenders.
Mandy Cole is the director of AWARE, Juneau’s domestic violence and sexual assault prevention and support organization. She said everyone needs to look out for each other to stop these kinds of attacks, instead of seeing it as only the responsibility of the person who may be drugged.
“The idea is that collectively, we can stop it,” she said. “Individually, it’s very difficult to stop”
Cole said that the more everyone is looking out for everyone else, the less perpetrators can get away with isolating and harming people.
“It’s not that no one puts their drink down when they go to the bathroom,” she said. “It’s that we’re all understanding that the person next to me’s safety is tied to mine, is tied to the person behind the bar, the person at the other table, like that. We’re all watching each other’s back, and that is the only way that this can stop being an effective strategy to harm people.”
In fact, Cole said, the people looking to harm others are counting on bystanders not speaking up.
The sort of behaviors she said to look for are someone trying to isolate and pull away one person or giving them a lot of direct attention for a long period of time.
She said disturbing this pattern doesn’t have to be a big scene. It can be as subtle as pulling the person back into the group and changing up who is talking with who.
“That’s the crazy easy part of all of this, is you don’t have to be certain that this person’s trying to harm this person in order to interrupt the pattern,” she said. “You can still interrupt it just because it feels a little off.”
And Cole said, if nothing nefarious is happening, this shouldn’t be too disruptive to anyone’s personal life.
“And if they were destined to meet and fall in love like that can still happen,” she said. “Even if you change the group configuration or you ask the, you know, person to sit by you for a little while.”
If anything does happen on a night out that leaves you feeling unsettled, or uncomfortable, Cole says anyone can contact AWARE — no matter your gender — for help accessing medical attention, testing and support. AWARE’s Crisis Line is (907) 586-1090.
