Remembering Kitty Genovese and acknowledging the Bystander Effect

I’ll never forget when I first learned about the bystander effect.  My role was to manage a behavioural safety system, and the psychology was important, because it had an impact on incident reporting, which is something safety practitioners are very passionate about.

Incident reporting, as it happens, is a crucial thread in the fabric of society.

In recent years my passion for the bystander effect has morphed a little more into the direct engagement of domestic abuse, but it truly has far-reaching applications.

The psychological theory is, the more people that witness a horrific incident, the less likely even one person will be to intervene.  It seems everybody is looking for everybody else to do the dirty work, but the dirty work in this situation comprises the risk of becoming personally involved, and the dirty work might just save lives and prevent or limit trauma.

We all hear angry and raised voices from time to time near our homes, and occasionally it may even be in our home.  If we are honest, we either don’t think much of it, or it piques our interest.  Neither motive is very helpful for a potential homicide victim, however.

Like many people, I have been a direct witness in several if not many violent attacks, and my standard response is to ring the emergency number.  We don’t always want to do that when it’s our next-door neighbour.  It can possibly make things much harder, even if they don’t find out who it is that called them in.

So what do we do when we hear screaming and shouting and other noises that lead us to become morbidly concerned for the lives involved? It’s not an easy one to answer.

Far too many children are direct witnesses of violence even adults should not be exposed to.  Violence does something to traumatise us, and once we have seen what we have seen we cannot undo what our senses have witnessed.

When it comes down to it, when we are faced with a crisis situation, an event is unfolding before our eyes, we all have an internal dialogue.  We all wrestle with what to do, and we are all tempted to tell ourselves that what we are seeing isn’t really happening. But, of course, it is happening. And every second counts.

There are clearly two different kinds of scenarios.

The first involves the common issue of an argument heard a few doors down.  It may die down after a few minutes or so.  Perhaps little if any harm is done.  It’s hard to know whether we should intervene in these cases, or even if it would be appropriate, and we err on the side of dignity.  “There are arguments in every home,” we tell ourselves.

The second scenario is clearer cut.  What we see we cannot deny, and the only choice left is do we intervene or not, is it safe to, and how are we to do that?  It can depend on many variables, but even being a man weighing 100 kg, I’m not always certain it is safe to do so, that I often find I work on instinct from my emergency management days.

If nothing else, we all have phones, and making an emergency call is the least we should do in the second scenario. Of course, when we make these calls, we do begin to feel we are getting personally involved, and it does feel like a risk, but we would want someone to do that for us.

The point of the bystander effect is this: if it were one of our family members being attacked, we would want anyone to make the emergency call into initiate the emergency response sequence.