Yokota puts Green Dot on violence

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman David Owsianka
  • 374th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan --  Members of Yokota have taken a step towards a five-year strategy to decrease interpersonal violence across the base through the Green Dot Program, which officially started here May 6, 2016.

Green Dot prepares organizations to implement a strategy of violence prevention that reduces power-based interpersonal violence, which includes sexual violence, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking, child abuse, elder abuse, and bullying.

"We want to empower our Airmen to become more proactive when it comes to preventing bad things from happening," said Capt. Lorna Gutierrez, 374th Surgical Operations Squadron operating room nurse and Green Dot wing lead coordinator. "We are focusing on doing more good things on a daily basis to change the way we think, our norm and the culture within our community to become better as a whole."
The Air Force contracted the non-profit Green Dot organization to provide these violence prevention tools to the total Air Force.

"As a service, our number one priority has and will continue to be response. However, in order to stop violence before it occurs we must dedicate time to prevention," said Chief Master Sgt. Melanie Noel, Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response senior enlisted advisor. "Helping our Airmen understand what they can do to prevent violence and how they can do it is the first step."

To effectively implement the program throughout the base, it will be split in four phases: leadership training, key influencer and early adopter, overview talks, and action events.

During the first phase, Yokota's leadership received training to endorse, model and support interpersonal violence not being tolerated in our community.
The Airmen selected to be key influencers and early adopter will receive in-depth skill development and make a commitment to endorse, model and support bystander and anti-violence behaviors.

Throughout the overview talks, trained personnel will introduce the Green Dot information to the remaining 80 to 85 percent of the base population. These talks will ensure that everyone will have an understanding of the program and be equipped to act reactively and proactively to reduce interpersonal violence.

The action events are goal oriented events intended to mobilize the base population to engage in bystander behaviors, provide practice opportunities and reinvigorate the key elements of the Green Dot program.

"This program is very good for our Air Force because in the culture we have had in the past too many Airmen are getting hurt," Tech. Sgt. Darl Parvin, 374th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron specialist section chief and green dot coordinator. "This new approach does not focus on the aftermath of a situation, it focuses on the root of the problem to help us identify them before they happen to keep our fellow Airmen safe."

Yokota's green dot implementers hope the program will help the Air Force culture take a preventative approach aimed at reducing negative violence-related actions within the Air Force communities.

"We are not asking everyone to make something huge, we are just asking everyone to do one small part," Parvin said. "We hope that this program will make a difference and change our current culture into a culture where interpersonal violence is not tolerated...not only at Yokota, but in our entire Air Force."

The Air Force hopes to consolidate its multiple violence-prevention strategies by using the Green Dot Program to help address multiple forms of interpersonal power-based violence through Airmen performing more peer-to-peer training.

The Air Force is dedicated to decreasing interpersonal violence and Green Dot is the answer for that. It introduces a system of Airmen helping other Airmen rather than long Powerpoint slides or computer based training. It's what the Air Force constantly instills in us: helping each other.