Shoma A. Chatterji explains the phenomenon of bystanders that often do not help accident or assault victims, letting them die instead.
Human behaviour is beyond logic, not always but often. It is discipline, training, education and order that help sustain logic in our lives. Psychiatrists and social scientists have delved into the human tendency of avoiding taking action in incidents of street violence when people witness an accident, a hit-and-run case, bikers snatching chains of passers-by, eve-teasing and molestation of women and children and harassment of senior citizens. This ‘looking the other way’ when help is desperately needed by victims of street violence is termed the ‘bystander effect.’
The term “bystander effect” was first coined in 1968, by two American psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latane. They conducted lab experiments which simulated an emergency and then monitored whether people reacted differently alone or in a crowd. Their research was spurred by the prominent murder of Kitty Genovese, a New York woman of 28 who was attacked by an unknown attacker but witnesses ignored her screams for help. After some time, she was attacked by the same man and this time, she died. There are different versions of this but the common truth in all of them is that – witnesses did not help her and she died because of this collective and casual apathy.
“This happened on a busy street in Manhattan in daytime and yet no one came to rescue her,” says filmmaker Atanu Ghosh who has made a feature film that deals with the ‘bystander effect’ in different hypothetical situations for research by a social scientist to study why this happens. The scientist appoints two young volunteers, a man and a woman to construct fictitious situations of street crisis to study what impact this has on the bystanders. Do they come forward to help? If they do not, why don’t they? Then, the story takes an interesting turn. A real crisis happens and this creates conflict in the volunteers and their mentor.
Journalist Erin Anderssen in Why good people stand by and let bad things happen (The Globe and Mail, March 23, 2013) writes, “While human behaviour tends to fall into patterns, they are more complex than we might think. In a recent study, German psychologists pored through the results of more than 100 bystander experiments and data from 7,700 participants going back half a century. They concluded that under certain (rather surprising) circumstances, being in a group can also be a powerful motivator to take action. It turns out that when a situation is especially dangerous, and when the risk to the person helping a victim is highest, the bystander effect actually melts away. In these cases, researchers theorize, the emergency itself tends to be less ambiguous, there is a greater cost in not helping, and the bystanders expect help from others in the crowd.”
The Bystander Effect is a global problem. Piyush Tewari, Founder and President, SaveLIFE Foundation reports the tragic case of five-year-old Om Gaikwad and his parents Aparna and Mangesh. They cried for over an hour, pleading bystanders for help, after being hit by a bus. The entire family, including Om, died mainly because bystanders refused to help them. In fact, The Law Commission of India states that 50% of those who die on Indian roads can be saved if they receive timely medical attention including assistance from bystanders and passers-by. An astounding 70,000 lives can be saved every year.” Even the Supreme Court of India has stated that, “Good Samaritans who come forward to help must be treated with respect and be assured that they will have to face no hassle”
The same bystanders will rush to a car that stops at a traffic signal with a glamorous film star seated inside. It does not occur to anyone to use their cell phones and call for help but they will use the cameras in the same cell-phones to click pictures of accidents and film stars caught at a traffic stop. This, inspite of the fact that eleven states in India have a common emergency service number. People can dial 108 to seek help. Tewari was inspired to create the NGO after his young nephew bled to death while passersby did nothing to intervene. The key to Mr. Tewari’s approach, tested as a pilot project both in Delhi and rural Maharashtra, is to mobilize volunteers who’ve been vetted both by his organization and by the local authorities.
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court on October 30 directed the Centre to pass an executive order to protect Good Samaritans, who rush road accident victims to hospitals, from harassment at the hands of police and from being summoned as witnesses in court. The order came from a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and R F Nariman on a PIL filed by NGO ‘SaveLIFE Foundation’, which claims that 75% of bystanders do not help a road accident victim fearing harassment at the hands of police, hospital authorities and possibly being made a witness in court. This order directing the government to implement the recommendations of a high-level committee will remain effective till Parliament enacts a law to provide protection to Good Samaritans.
The bench asked the government to base the executive order on the detailed recommendations submitted by a court-appointed expert committee headed by the additional secretary in the home ministry. Ministry of road transport and highways submitted an affidavit saying it agreed with the recommendations.
But is this collective human apathy only for the fear of running into needless legal hassles and harassment at the hands of the police? Or is there something more than fears triggered by concrete incidents of harassment of the legal and police force of witnesses who come forward to help? According to Latané and Darley, there are five characteristics of emergencies that affect bystanders: (a) emergencies that involve threat of harm or actual harm, (b) emergencies that are unusual and rare, (c) the degree of help different kinds of crises demand, (d) the fact that emergencies cannot be predicted or anticipated, and (e) the recognition that emergencies call for immediate action.
The cognitive and behavioral processes bystanders experience as a result of these factors are (a) noticing that something is going on, (b) interpret the situation as one of emergency, (c) degree of responsibility the bystander feels, (d) form of assistance he is prepared to offer and (e) actual implementation.
The collective, casual and insensitive apathy of bystanders can be read as an additional act of violence perpetrated on the victim. If you watch someone being attacked on the streets and do not come forward to help, are you not indulging in a second attack of passive violence on the victim?
