A few months ago I was in a bar with two friends when, a few tables away, we heard a glass smash and looked up to find a man and woman in the middle of an argument. He slapped her and walked out. Everyone froze. She looked horribly alone for a few seconds, hurt and humiliated. Then a customer walked over to see if she was all right, as did a member of staff. They sat with her for some time, while my friends and I wondered awkwardly what we should be doing. It seemed as if she was being offered the support she needed, but was that enough? Should we have offered to act as witnesses if she wanted to take it further? We didn’t – and ended up feeling powerless, even guilty.
A decade ago, on the top deck of a night bus wending its way out of central London, I heard a commotion behind me. A man was harassing two women, both clearly uncomfortable and frightened. He sat in the seats behind them, leaning in and talking while they asked him to leave them alone in broken English – they were tourists. Feeling brave, I went over and sat down near them, hoping that would inhibit him. He wasn’t happy and turned his fire on me. Although he got off after a stop or two, he promised to “cut [my] fucking head off” as he went down the stairs. After it was all over, the two women thanked me and I got a pat on the back from another passenger after they’d left too. It seemed as if I’d done the right thing and I felt pleased with myself.
Another time, I was on a very crowded tube train. Someone pulled the emergency cord and a woman, hyperventilating, stumbled out on to the platform. She was terrified, crying out between breaths, and was led to a bench by the baffled-looking commuter who happened to have been standing next to her. He sat with her, shrugging his shoulders slightly as hundreds of us stared, standing like penguins in front of the open doors, waiting for the train to get on its way. It occurred to me that she needed to be told to breathe more slowly. She was experiencing a panic attack and could have done with reassurance and someone to help her pace herself. There was no reason I couldn’t have done it – I wasn’t in a hurry. But instead I stayed put. I felt embarrassed right then and selfish afterwards.
Those are the times I’ve been a bystander, and it’s a mixed record. It’s an intensely awkward role to play, and it’s not always clear in the moment what the right thing to do is. Intervening can feel like an act of bravado, or attention-seeking – maybe that’s what motivated me on that night bus. But primed by all those videos of racist abuse, and stories of the pain that the silence of onlookers can cause, shouldn’t we always be prepared to speak up for someone who is being attacked?
Each of the incidents I’ve described happened in the “real” world. There was the opportunity for face-to-face interaction. But I’ve been a bystander far more often, I suppose – we all have – in another arena: online. And a new paper in the journal Computers and Human Behaviour raises some interesting questions about when and why we intervene. Researchers at UCLA set up a fake Facebook profile in which a “mean” comment was posted under a range of different status updates, such as “I hate it when you miss someone like crazy and you think they might not miss you back”. In each case, the “mean” riposte was: “Who cares! This is why nobody likes you …” Most subjects agreed that this constituted bullying, and many said that they would be likely to intervene – either by challenging the comment or sending a private message of support. Interestingly, there was less sympathy when the original message was more personal, suggesting that people who “overshared” might be seen as bringing criticism on themselves.
More important, perhaps, is the finding, uncovered in earlier studies, that people are less likely to intervene online than they are in the real world. This could be due to the bystander effect – psychologists have known for a long time that the more witnesses there are to an emergency, the less likely any given individual is to take action. It’s a kind of apathy related to the sense that someone else will probably deal with it, so we don’t have to. But it could also be due to the terrifying nature of online bullying, which can very easily expand to involve hundreds, if not thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Who wants to mess with that volume of fury?
But the literature also shows that, whether online or off, “victims experience heightened distress when bystanders do not intervene”. What’s more, it has been shown that “receiving support from onlookers can significantly alleviate victims’ plight”.
One a recent flight from Paris to Sydney, the writer Catharine Lumby found herself sitting next to a volatile, aggressive man Part-way through the flight, he suddenly shouted, “I will kill you! I will kill you!” Lumby writes: “I’m a woman in my 50s who has travelled a lot and I have a very thick skin. But the man next to me put me in fear of my life. The flight attendants on Air France, however, refused to move me. The other passengers looked the other way. I spent the next eight hours scared and very upset. On reflection, what really upset me was that no one offered to help.”
Echoing Lumby’s experience, a report into anti-Muslim abuse towards the end of last year found repeated examples of people standing by while bullying occurred. “When I suffer abuse in public, people walk off or stare,” said one respondent. Another recalled, “When I was walking to the shops a man behind me pulled my hijab and strangled me but no one stood up for me, and he said to me, ‘Are you going to bomb Boots?’”
In contrast, Ruhi Rahman drew strength from the reaction of her fellow passengers after a “racist and threatening” man approached her and her sister on the train. “Before I even got a chance to react to his comments the women beside me supported me and helped. After a while most of the people on the metro came over and spoke up for us and were being so supportive.” Rahman told the Newcastle Chronicle the experience made her feel “really optimistic and hopeful … I have never felt more proud of being a Geordie. It was lovely that everyone came together to help us and I can’t thank them all enough.”
I’m not saying we should all become have-a-go heroes. Stepping in can be dangerous. But intervention doesn’t have to mean tackling an aggressor. It can involve reaching out a hand of support in the moments afterwards, offering practical help, or sending a message once things have died down.
Increasingly we find ourselves in crowds – making our way through cities, flying between them, joining in discussion and argument on the internet. Ironically, these crowds, each one a mass of humanity, can feel like the least human force on Earth. Perhaps from time to time we can try to be among the faces that stand out.
