If you’re out late at night in downtown Victoria, you may have seen a pair of people wandering around with peach-coloured shirts. They can often be found near the Sticky Wicket, Lucky Bar, Bastion Square, and along Douglas. These places are hotspots for young people looking for a fun night out. Unfortunately, they’re also hotspots for harassment and sexual assaults at night. The peach-shirt pair is working to stop these occurrences before they escalate and offer support for those being preyed upon. 

They’re the Good Night Out street team, a pilot program that launched this summer in Victoria after years of success on Granville St. in Vancouver. It was the first of its kind in North America when it was launched in 2017. During the busy summer months, two volunteer team members, who are skilled in bystander intervention, work to curb incidents of gendered violence and support the safety of those enjoying downtown between the hours of 11:30pm and 3am.

They act as the eyes and ears of vulnerable people out at night—from helping a drunk person get a cab home, to stepping in when an interaction seems negative. They’ll even help you charge your phone to make sure you get home safe.

“The main support they provide people with is just generally checking on people, especially if they're alone,” said Good Night Out co-founder Stacey Forrester. “A lot of what they do is supporting people who are over intoxicated in the public realm, maybe they're separated from friends.”

After the success of the project in Vancouver, the federal government gave funding to Good Night Out to launch street team pilots in Victoria and Nelson. In its first summer, the Victoria street team supported an estimated 100 people per month, with demand carrying into the fall months, according to Forrester. 

“Part of this pilot is determining, could it be more people [patrolling]? Could it be different hours? That's kind of the nature of the pilot,” Forrester said. “But to make our money go as far as possible, we're trying it as a team of two.”

As we head into the colder, quieter months, the pilot will take a hiatus to plan for next year and assess funding. It’ll be back again in 2025, with updates coming through on its Instagram page. 

Good Night Out can also be hired for events—they’ve worked large-scale festivals like Victoria Craft Beer Week and have partnered with UVic to patrol the campus in September when partying peaks at the school. 

Fundraising partnership with Hotel Zed

To support the work they’re doing, as they look to potentially expand in Victoria, Good Night Out has partnered with Hotel Zed, a BC chain known for its sex-positive mandate and ad campaigns. 

Trina Notman, VP of Communications for Hotel Zed, was first introduced to the Good Night Out team when the hotel ran a tongue-in-cheek campaign to fundraise for the non-profit—offering access to its Shaggin’ Wagon for hotel guests booking through the website Nooner. While working on the sex-positive campaign together, Notman fell in love with the important work of Good Night Out and decided to join its board. After all, she said, everybody knows a woman who has been drugged or assaulted at a bar—something that should not be viewed as normal.

When she joined the board, she realized how difficult it was for Good Night Out to get funding, with potential partners not wanting to associate with the unsavoury topic of sexual assault.

“You know, nobody wants to put this on their website, no one wants to put this in an annual report,” Notman said. “So it's really, really, soul-crushingly hard to get funding for their super important work.”

Speaking to her boss at Hotel Zed, it was clear that a continued partnership made sense, with both brands aligned on the importance of consent and safety linked to sex-positive messaging. 

“At Hotel Zed, we talk a lot about sex and you can't really talk about sex without talking about consent,” said Notman.

To help the team at Good Night Out continue their work, Hotel Zed will be matching donations up to $25K. The campaign launched on Saturday, marking International Consent Day, and will run until the end of December.

“That’s a massive amount of money for us,” said Notman, hoping the matching campaign could both help the current work of the non-profit and help to expand it.

Victoria’s sexual assault reckoning  

Good Night Out launched its satellite office in Victoria in 2022, after several requests for workshops in the area. Good Night Out offers training on sexual assault and consent to businesses—mainly bars and restaurants, but tattoo shops and other industries have started requesting these workshops more. 

At the time, Victoria was going through a reckoning, addressing sexual violence and harassment in its hospitality industry. In 2021, more than a dozen women accused a bartender at Chuck’s Burger Bar—a once popular restaurant on Yates—of drugging their drinks and raping them while unconscious. Management was accused of protecting the bartender, who was eventually arrested and charged with eight counts of sexual assault in BC and six counts of sexual assault in Ontario. Protests were held in front of the restaurant for weeks before it closed permanently. Questions swirled, with people wondering how someone could attack so many people, in two provinces, over the years without being caught.

As more restaurant workers spoke openly about their experiences with sexual harassment and violence, it became apparent that this behaviour was common, and often tolerated, in Victoria’s hospitality industry—for both female employees and customers. One worker told Capital Daily she had a story of harassment or assault for every restaurant she had worked at in the city. Many saw it as the industry’s own #METOO movement.

Forrester said that when they first began their workshops, “100% of businesses were reaching out because they'd had a case either of staff-to-staff harassment or someone was harassed or assaulted as a customer.”

Now, she says, it’s closer to half of the businesses reaching out, with some choosing to be proactive before an incident occurs. She says this reflects a change in people’s understanding of these incidents.

“I think sometimes we don't think about sexual violence response until we're in the thick of responding to it, much like insurance, much like just society in general, we don't think proactively,” Forrester said. “So seeing that shift has been very positive to witness.”

How to intervene as a bystander

As Notman noted, most people know someone who has had a troubling experience during a night out. It happens constantly, but many people don’t know what to do when they witness something concerning.

“Whether it's someone in a mental-health crisis, or someone getting creeped on, or whatever the thing is, people tend to freeze up,” Forrester said. “It's definitely a skill you have to practice, and you have to build up.”

Forrester says there are many ways to help a vulnerable person that can protect your safety as a bystander.

“My really basic advice is, if you are moving around, whether it's at work or you're shopping downtown, and something causes you to do a double take—that is worth paying attention to,” she said. “Your gut isn't always right, but it does exist for a reason, right?”

Making eye contact, she says, is a great way to diffuse a tense situation you might be witnessing. If that fails, intervention might be the next step.

“Obviously, you can be direct but if you're not comfortable with that, you can—instead of engaging with the aggressor—engage with the victim or the target: ‘Hey, are you okay?’” said Forrester.

You could try a distraction tactic, asking: “Do you know where the bus stop is?”

“Just kind of insert yourself in a way that has nothing to do with the behavior,” Forrester said.

If something happens and you didn’t act quick enough, Forrester says it’s still powerful to check in on the victim.

“Say, ‘Hey, I saw what just happened, and I'm really sorry that that happened to you, but I'm here now. How can I help you now?’” suggests Forrester.

She says people have a misconception that bystander intervention has to be confrontational and that it's inherently aggressive. 

“I think if I wanted people to know anything, it doesn't have to be [aggressive]—it can be using humour, it can be using kindness. It can be done to have both people in the dynamic have their needs met,” Forrester said. “It's not necessarily about a high-intensity, high-risk kind of gesture.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated GNO received funding for a street team in Nanaimo. The funding was for a street team in Nelson.