Sarah Kanowski

And then in 2020 when Han passed, public awareness grew from that.

And so the Make Bystander program really talks about not just what happens at the point of violence but what happens at the beginning of the line and what are all these things that contribute to men's entitlement to use violence, men's violence against women, and what are the experiences of women in these spaces of domestic violence like.

And so I started to learn a lot about not only what violence and coercive control looks like but also what is the culture that permits it to exist.

Yeah, that's a good question.

So I started studying psychology, I think, in 2018.

And so obviously Han was a good friend throughout that.

That's probably something I should have said earlier in terms of who she was as a friend.

Han was someone who...

uh, would text me before and after every exam, you know, and she's the only person that would text me before and after every exam.

There were times, uh, when I'm committed to study, I'm committed to it.

So I didn't even look at my phone of a morning of an exam and I would come out of an exam at 1130 AM and I'd have a text saying, good luck, good luck, good luck at like 8 AM.

And then a text at 11 AM saying, um, how did you go?

How did you go?

So, you know, that's, that's how she showed up.

Um, and that's how she always showed up.

But, yeah, throughout my study in psychology, every opportunity I had within those courses, I looked in that direction of the culture that we live in that permits that kind of violence at the end of the line.

There was a lot of underpinning kind of cultural things that I thought was really normal.

like sexist language, sexist jokes, victim blaming and like things that I had done, objectifying women, all of these things that as a teen, as a 20-year-old dude thought was just this is the way guys relate to each other.

We just talk shit about women.

That's the way we are.