Japan’s Life Safety Education program includes bystander intervention education. However, the Life Safety Education program’s material, which the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology prepared, does not refer to the motivation for recognizing one’s responsibility as a bystander. This paper attempts to explain the responsibilities that bystanders have in the space of sexual violence from Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. The public space in which sexual violence occurs can be understood as a place in which forces that exclude victims operate. Not only are harassment and victimization difficult to prosecute, but the process remains difficult for the victim, even after the harassment is reported to the police. In addition, harassment accusations are sometimes incorrectly deemed false. Such situations perpetuate the marginalization of women and those who are vulnerable to harassment. Ignoring sexual violencewhile witnessing it is not tantamount to inactivity; however, this ignorance can be positioned as an entity that cites and reinforces an order that permits harassment. Butler presented the idea of the responsibility of citation regarding hate speech. Following this idea, the original act of sexual violence may have been committed by the perpetrator, but the bystander can be understood as being responsible for citing the order that permits this violence. Ignoring harassment is not truly an act of passivity, but rather an act that forgives the harassment and allows it to be repeated. Furthermore, the active intervention of bystanders does not simply prevent the repetition and reinforcement of the harmful order of the public space—it also opens the possibility of shifting this order. Bystanders are responsible for disrupting the order that enables sexual violence. The bystander intervention program was originally anticipated to be more effective at reducing violence than traditional victim/perpetrator-focused models, calling on people to be allies of victims. However, the othering of the perpetrator leads to a lack of questioning of one’ own actions. The understanding that actively incorporates bystanders into perpetration offers effective ways to recognize one’s responsibility for bystander intervention.