Harassment exercises are scenario-based applied improv activities for recognizing, naming, and responding to harassment situations. Using role-play and improvisational skills, participants practice assertiveness, bystander intervention, and supportive responses to individuals experiencing harassment. The exercises make visible the dynamics of power, complicity, and bystander choice that typical compliance training addresses abstractly, and develop the specific language and physical confidence to act in real situations.
Structure
Setup
The facilitator establishes a scenario: a workplace interaction, a public situation, or a social context in which one participant is experiencing unwanted behavior from another. Roles are assigned or volunteered: the person experiencing harassment, the person responsible for the harassment, bystanders, and potential allies.
The Scenario
The scene plays out in real time. The person in the bystander role must decide when and how to intervene -- or whether to. The facilitator may pause the scene to allow the group to offer alternative responses, to rewind and try a different approach, or to explore the same moment from multiple perspectives.
Intervention Practice
Participants practice specific response strategies: direct address, distraction and redirection, delegation to authority, and after-the-fact support for the person targeted. The exercise can be replayed with different interventions to compare their effectiveness.
Debrief
The debrief explores what made intervention difficult, what language or physical confidence was required, and what barriers -- social, professional, or situational -- participants noticed in the scenario.
How to Teach It
Objectives
Harassment exercises develop the specific confidence and language to act in situations where most people freeze, defer, or rationalize inaction. They make visible the bystander dynamics that perpetuate harmful behavior and train practical, usable responses.
How to Explain It
"We're going to look at a situation together. You're going to see something happening. Your job is to figure out: what can you actually do? Not what you should do in theory -- what you can actually do, right now, in this scene."
Scaffolding
Begin with lower-stakes scenarios before introducing more charged situations. Establish psychological safety explicitly before the exercise begins: participants should know they can pause, step out, or ask for a redo at any point. The forum theater tradition (Augusto Boal) provides useful scaffolding for this type of work.
Common Pitfalls
Groups sometimes produce heroic intervention scenarios that do not reflect the social reality of most bystander situations. The coaching note is to push toward what is actually possible in the specific social context of the scenario -- the intervention that a real person in that role could actually execute -- rather than the ideal response.
In Applied Settings
Learning Objectives
In applied settings, Harassment exercises develop three specific capacities: the ability to recognize harassment in real time, the confidence to respond (not just to know what one should do), and the practical language for bystander intervention. The gap between knowing what is right and having the capacity to act is what these exercises address.
Workplace Transfer
The exercises prepare participants to act in situations where inaction is the statistical norm -- not because bystanders approve of harassment, but because they lack the script, the confidence, or the social permission to intervene. Scenario-based practice with realistic workplace dynamics gives participants an embodied rehearsal that purely conceptual training cannot provide. The specific language of intervention -- "Hey, that's not okay" or "Can I help you find someone?" -- becomes more available under pressure when it has been practiced.
Facilitation Context
Harassment exercises are used in organizational training, HR compliance programs reframed for engagement, leadership development, and community programs addressing power and accountability. They are particularly effective for groups where compliance training has been mandated but has not produced behavioral change. Facilitators should have training in both applied improv and the specific organizational or legal context.
Debrief Framing
Ask participants: "What made it hard to intervene? What would you need -- permission, language, support -- to do what you practiced here in a real situation? What did you notice about the moment right before action was possible?"
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Rapid-response exercises building the ability to respond quickly and effectively to unexpected situations or questions.
Drop Inhibitions
Drop Inhibitions is a category of applied improvisation exercises designed to reduce self-consciousness and free participants for more authentic expression. The exercises use physical activity, group play, absurdity, and supportive social norms to displace the internal critical voice that typically moderates spontaneous expression. They are used to prepare groups for creative, collaborative, or personally vulnerable work by lowering the threshold for authentic participation.
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How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Harassment. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/harassment
The Improv Archive. "Harassment." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/harassment.
The Improv Archive. "Harassment." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/harassment. Accessed March 17, 2026.
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