Take a step forward

Methodology inspired and adapted from a similar activity in the manual ‘Compass: a manual for human rights education with young people (2012 edition). https://www.coe.int/en/web/compass

Duration of activity: 60 minutes

Learning objectives:

Explore how stereotypes, norms and social perceptions about gender and sexual orientation are impacting and limiting people’s lives
To foster an understanding of possible personal consequences of belonging to certain social minorities
Identify the barriers and challenges different groups of people often experience in their environments
To raise awareness about inequality of opportunity
Explore how social privilege negatively impacts people’s lives
Foster empathy with others who are different

Materials needed:

Role cards (cut and rolled up) and a hat from where the young people will pick their role
An open space (a corridor, large room or outdoors)
Soft/relaxing music

Recommended prior reading

Step by step process of the activity:Duration: 30 minutes

(10 minutes to get into the role, 20 minutes to step forward)

Explain to the group that you will conduct an activity in which they will need to play a role and assume a new ‘identity’
Invite them to take a slip of paper from the hat, which will represent their new identity. They can then sit down (preferably on the floor) and read their role card carefully. Ask young people to read their role silently and not share it with anyone.
Discourage questions at this point. Explain that even if they don’t know much about a person like this, they can just use their imagination.
Create a calm atmosphere with some soft background music and invite the group to remain silent.
To help young people get into the role more easily, ask them to close their eyes and try to imagine who they are by answering the following questions in their head. They need to remain calm and still.
- Give yourself a name.
- What is your gender? Are you a man, woman, trans, nonbinary?
- How old are you?
- Where were you born?
- How do you look like? How tall are you? What colour are your eyes?
- How do you normally dress? What is your style?
- How does the house you’re living in look like? Go around your house in your imagination
- What sort of work do you do? How much money do you earn each month? Do you have a comfortable living?
- What do you do with your free time? How do you socialize?
- What makes you happy?
- What is difficult for you?
Now ask young people to begin to get into role and start walking around as if they are this person. After about a minute, ask them to line up in one horizontal line (so they stand next to each other, shoulder to shoulder)
Tell the group that you are going to read out a list of situations or events. Every time that they can answer “yes” to the statement, they should take a step forward. Otherwise, they should stay where they are and not move.
Remind the group that it is important to critically assess whether the person they are pretending to be really has the opportunity to do what is said in the statement and only move forward if this holds true for this person. Even if they are not totally sure, they can still guess what would hold true for this person. Explain that this is not a race and that they shouldn’t move forward just because others are moving.
Read out the situations one at a time. Pause for a while between each statement to allow the group some time to have a think and step forward (or not). Look around to take note of their positions relative to each other.
Once all the statements have been read out, invite everyone to take note of their final positions and to look around them so that can see the positions of the others.
Invite young people to share their different roles in front of the group and to again pay attention to their different positions, now that the know ‘who is who’.
Before moving on to debriefing, give a couple of minutes to young people to come out of their role by ‘brushing’ it off or ‘shaking’ it off or by using any other fun ritual (i.e. saying their real name and what they had for breakfast this morning etc.)

Facilitation questions for reflection and debriefing:Duration: 30 min

How did you feel during this exercise?
How did you feel stepping forward or not stepping forward?
How did you know about the character whose role you had to play? How did you know whether you should have stepped forward or not? Was it through personal experience or through other sources of information (news, social media and jokes)?
Do you think this information and the images you have of the characters are reliable? Are some of our perceptions about certain groups of people often based on prejudice and stereotypes?
While you were moving forward or not, did you have to hide any parts of yourself? Which parts of yourself you did you have to hide?
Why did you have to hide these parts of yourself?
What prevented you from moving forward? What types of difficulties or barriers did you experience?
When the statements were completed what was your first impression when you looked around and saw everyone’s different positions?
For those of you who kept stepping forward, did you notice, while you were moving, that other people were left behind? At which point did you notice? Or Why didn’t you notice?
And those of you who didn’t step forward as much, what did you think of the ones who stepped forward?
Did you feel at any point during the activity that your (human) rights were being violated? In what way?
Why is there such a variation in ‘distance’ between different people you think?
Does this activity mirror society in some way? In what way does this mirroring happen?
What does this activity highlight about the inequalities in our society regarding gender, gender identity and sexual orientation?
What steps can be taken to address these inequalities?
How can we ensure that all people’s rights are equally safeguarded?

Take home messages and activity wrap up:

Even though we all have the same rights, but some groups have more social privileges and enjoy a different range of activity and opportunity than others. Social norms about gender and sexual orientation create different social strata which don’t all have the same value, power or privilege. This in turn gives rise in social inequality which acts as a source of discrimination, marginalization and exclusion, resulting in human rights violations of others. Lack of freedom of expression of gender identity and/or sexual orientation, been forced to hide part of your identity, barriers to access to health, barriers to professional development, bullying, isolation, harassment, violence all constitute significant violations of a person’s rights.

It is important that societies (and institutions and authorities) ensure that all people’s rights are safeguarded so all people have an equal chance to be happy, safe, develop and reach their outmost potential.

Tips for facilitators:

It is best that we conduct this activity after we had some introductory activity on identifying and challenging social norms about gender, gender identities, gender expressions and sexual orientation.
If you do this activity outdoors, make sure that the participants can hear you, especially if you are doing it with a large group! You may need to use your co-facilitators to relay the statements.
Please feel free to make your own role cards! Those offered here are meant to serve as samples. The closer your role cards reflect your local context, the more the young people can learn from the activity.
It is also important that you adapt the roles accordingly, to avoid embarrassing any young person whose personal situation may closely mirror the situation in one of the roles. If you know the personal situations of the participants in your group, please avoid using specific cards which may bring a young person in an uncomfortable position.
However, because you cannot always be aware of everyone’s personal life situation, a young person may feel disturbed or emotionally caught up in one of the roles. As a facilitator you need to keep alert and to pay particular attention to participants who have difficulty to ‘drop’ the role afterwards or who display an uneasy behaviour. In such a case, please try to speak to that person privately after the activity finishes.
Make sure every person in your group gets a chance to speak during the debriefing. This activity can bring up strong emotions, and the more the young people can express themselves and their feelings, the more sense they will make of it. Spend more time on the debriefing if needed.
This activity can easily be conducted outside or in a large room so young people can move easily. The power of this activity lies in the impact of actually seeing the distance increasing between each other, especially at the end.
Young people are generally aware that others have materially more or less than they do. However, they are often unable to realize their own privileges. This activity can help the young people to put their lives into a larger perspective. For instance, in their role, they may experience bullying, but they enjoyed strong bonds with their friends and family and could arise above the difficulties.

Adapting the activity for online implementation

● This is quite a complex activity to implement online because of the different logistics involved. Allocating roles to individual participants (one by one via a private message, so that others can’t see them) will take time and requires clear coordination between you and your co-facilitator(s). If you have the flexibility, it is best to take a break so you can allocate the roles with more ease. Or you can have one facilitator run a quick energizer with the group, while the other engages in the process of role allocation. This will allow for a smoother flow of the activity, without young people having to wait around and getting frustrated.

● Because it is more difficult for participants to trace the ‘distance’ between them online, you can start this activity by asking them to share their identities before you start reading out the statements. This can help them to mentally keep a clearer record of people who are moving.

● Once the roles have been allocated and reiterated, you can replicate the physical movement required for taking a step forward in different ways, such as:

● Option 1: You can read out the statements and ask participants to raise their hand, a coloured piece of paper or press a reaction every time a statement applies to them. Ask participants to keep a tally of the statements they answer ‘yes’ to, so, at the end of the activity, all participants can see which ones enjoyed most of the privileges

● Option 2: You can put up the statements on an online quiz and ask participants to log in with their ‘pseudonym’ (the name they have given to their character. At the end of the game you can see who scored the most points by answering ‘yes’.

● Option 3: If you don’t have many participants you can create a google document, google sheet or a google slide where you can ask participants to represent themselves with a small image (a dot, an emoji etc) .
– Have pre-selected images that participants can choose from. To enable the images to move around freely, click on the options ‘Wrap text’ and ‘Set margins to 0’.
– Ask participants to place themselves on the starting line by using the pseudonym they gave for themselves in their role.
– Make sure all images start from the same line (to make it easier on participants you can have a line drawn on the document)
– Read out the statements. Every time a statement applies to a participant, they move their image forward
– At the end you will have a visual representation of each participant’s ‘place’ according to their privileges.

● Follow up with the facilitation questions and the wrap up as outlined in the activity.