In the wake of the terrible news about Charles Saatchi seemingly
assaulting his wife in public last Saturday, one of the most persistent bits of
outrage I’ve seen is directed not at him, but at the other patrons of the
restaurant in which the alleged assault took place. Namely: how could they have
not intervened? How could they have just gone on with their lunch? Why did the
photographer not do something? They are all terrible, callous, selfish human
beings & should be ashamed of themselves.
It’s a question that comes up a lot: how come nobody did
anything? In all sorts of crimes, but especially crimes of male violence
against women and children, when the crime becomes public and the full facts of
it emerge (or as full as can ever be the case for events that are normally
private and hidden), it becomes obvious that there was in fact a web of people
who had known all along that something was wrong and chose not to intervene.
The recent revelations of systemic rape and sexual exploitation of vulnerable
girls in Oxford is a good example.
The culprit, though, is not people’s inherent callousness
and lack of empathy: it’s a psychological phenomenon called “the bystander effect”, and it’s an incredibly powerful instinct. It works like this: when
there is more than one person witnessing some kind of event (say, a man
throttling a woman), the likelihood of any one of them responding/intervening
is in inverse proportion to their number. In other words, the more people
witness an attack, the less likely any one of them is to offer help to the
victim.
There are all kinds of reasons hypothesized for this
phenomenon (read the Wiki article), but I think at least in part it has to have
an adaptive element to it. Being the first person to respond to an abnormal
situation can be dangerous, especially if one is not sure of the social rules
governing the situation. Be the case as it may, the point I’m making is that
the bystander effect doesn't make us bad people, just people who have a
tendency to react with a remarkable degree of similarity to certain stimuli.
The good news about the bystander effect is that it’s
relatively easy to disrupt. As soon as one person moves to intervene – it can
literally be something as simple as getting up and turning to walk in the direction
of the incident – the charm is usually broken and more people will offer help.
The question, specifically in the case of what looks like a domestic violence
incident, is: should they?
Male violence in the context of intimate relationships is
not just a series of unconnected incidents; it has its own cycle and follows an
internal logic that can sometimes be counter-intuitive. It’s possible that the
bystander effect unwittingly protects women who are victims of violence from
worse violence. Confronting an abuser might feel good to us, and might stop the
attack that is happening in front of our eyes, but it is highly likely to lead
to further retribution for the victim behind closed doors. The perpetrator may,
and in fact probably will, punish the victim for “embarrassing him” by “making
him” hit her in public, exposing him to what he sees as undeserved shaming.
The most dangerous times for victims are times at which the
perpetrator feels like his power over them is being questioned or shaken. Most
people now know that a key turning point can be when a victim tries to leave (the
majority of women who are murdered by partners are killed during or just after
leaving), but the challenge can come from outside the relationship as well as
inside. For example, when family members try to stage an intervention or openly
get the victim away from the perpetrator, she often ends up getting worse than usual beating, to reinforce the
man’s power over her.
So while it’s tempting (and certainly common) to sneer with
contempt at the over-privileged restaurant patrons who failed to lift a finger
to help Nigella Lawson, we must remember that 1) it’s not really their
individual moral failing and 2) it might have put her in greater danger. As it
happens, she has already been put in greater danger, by the exposure of the
attack in the press and the media circus around it. Charles Saatchi has not, so
far, paid any kind of price for allegedly attacking her; in fact, he’s been
given a bigger than usual platform by the Evening Standard, to pooh-pooh the
whole thing as a “playful tiff”. Meanwhile we don’t know how his wife is doing,
or what she is thinking and doing – or whether she is even OK.
