The Guilty Bystander

7 min readNov 21, 2023

How to avoid becoming an “innocent” bystander

Trigger Warning: This article includes references to actions that some people may find triggering, such as rape, murder and descriptions of trauma

In 2009 ABC News reported a gang rape at a High School in Richmond, USA. The victim was a 16-year-old girl who was walking in front of her school when she bumped into a friend. They walked to the school Courtyard where a group of boys and men were hanging out. Shortly afterwards, she told them she had a headache and was leaving. She remembered nothing between then and waking up in hospital in excruciating pain. Her face was smashed. One of her toenails had been torn off. A layer of skin on her back had come off. She had cuts, bruises and abrasions all over. She felt nauseous and said it felt like someone had taken out her insides, stabbed them and put them back in. Her legs were especially painful.

She did not remember the 20 or so people who watched the attack. She did not remember the 10 men and boys gang-raping and beating her for two-and-a-half hours. Throughout the attack, no one tried to stop the attackers. No one contacted the authorities.

ABC News reported that Jon Darley, a professor of psychology, explained that as one of the boys or men grabbed her, and someone else did something else, it became more sexual in nature. Each act licenced what had gone before, and made it more likely what came next.

The Bystander Effect

Humans are social animals. We have evolved to react when we see people in need. Most of us will stop to see if we can help a child screaming and flailing in a river. Once the first couple of people come to help, others usually look to see if they, too, can help.

The bystander effect describes exactly the opposite. It is an event in which a witness or bystander does not volunteer to help a victim or person in distress. Instead, they just watch what is happening. It is strange because most of us have a natural inclination to help.

Too often, we are held back for any of three reasons. One is that we worry we, too, may become a victim. If we see a young man being beaten by a group of men, or a child being pulled in a violently moving river, we fear stepping in for our own safety. Another is when we are part of a crowd. We sense that our individual responsibility to help is reduced by the presence of others, hoping someone else will take the first step. The third is our anxiety about behaving in a way that others judge as correct and socially appropriate. We worry about what people will think of us if we react differently. Once one person holds back, everyone who is worried also holds back.

The Impact

A friend of mine was at a busy car park last year. Everyone was jostling to get into the car park. One driver got very pushy, pushing in front of another driver trying to park. He felt he was entitled to the space she was driving towards. He drove his car in front of hers, got out and started bashing her car windows. The woman in the car was terrified. My friend was incensed. How should she respond?

The problem with bystanding, watching some sort of attack or aggression and doing nothing about it, is that the victim is entirely alone. The problem with intervening is the risk of being attacked yourself.

There is another dynamic that is probably key to the bystander effect. Everyone else who was watching the scene will have been influenced by what happened next. The issue of doing nothing, and no one else doing anything, is that it sends out a message to the aggressor that s/he can get away with what s/he is doing. This level of aggression becomes normalised. The next time, the aggressor may well do more than just bash the windows with their bare hands, testing out what else they can get away with.

How did my friend respond?

She and her sister opened the door and got out of the car — probably at no inconsiderable risk to themselves. This prompted two responses. Other drivers started opening their doors, some getting out of their cars. The aggressor saw several people stepping up, making it clear he had gone too far. He stopped what he was doing and later apologised.

Silently Complicit

Have you ever wondered how the various people in a crowd can behave so differently from each other when they come across a violent incident?

For most of us, it is very rare to come across a violent incident in public. We are not trained in how to respond. So we fall back on a very human way of managing situations that are new to us. We adopt micro-behaviours. We test the water in a small way to see the response before taking the next step. We may mutter or look disapprovingly rather than launch straight into a physical intervention. If our action meets the approval of others in the crowd, we feel emboldened to take the next micro-step, such as calling out to the attacker or talking to the victim. We see how that goes down. If others in the crowd still back us up, we may well edge closer to the attacker.

What about the attacker? How do the micro-behaviours of the crowd impact their actions? It all depends on what is going on and what provoked the attack. But at a very minimum, the attacker becomes aware of several people disapproving of their actions and starts to recognise that the crowd may become more assertive.

This is why watching an attack in complete silence is equivalent to supporting the attack itself. Attackers sense the absence of any restraining influence from the crowd. They get a sense of power that no one is going to challenge them, that the crowd in some way agrees with their actions.

There is no such thing as an innocent bystander because any bystander has some power to influence the attack.

For anyone who is unwilling to be complicit in an attack they are witnessing, the big question comes down to this. How should they respond? It is one thing to know you have the power to influence an attack. It is quite another to know which actions are most appropriate to avoid inflaming or provoking the attacker further.

Safe Techniques

In practice, what to do given the real concern about becoming a victim yourself, the anxiety about behaving in socially unacceptable ways and waiting for someone else to take responsibility.

There are many ideas available on the internet about how to act safely in a crowd witnessing an attack. The University of Cambridge, for example, offers four suggestions to allow you to stay safe but to help bring the attack to an end:

Direct action
Call out negative behaviour, tell the person to stop or ask the victim if they are OK. Do this as a group if you can. Be polite. Don’t aggravate the situation — remain calm and state why something has offended you. Stick to exactly what has happened, don’t exaggerate.
Distract
Interrupt, start a conversation with the perpetrator to allow their potential target to move away or have friends intervene. Or come up with an idea to get the victim out of the situation — tell them they need to take a call, or you need to speak to them; any excuse to get them away to safety. Alternatively, try distracting, or redirecting the situation.
Delegate
If you are too embarrassed or shy to speak out, or you don’t feel safe to do so, get someone else to step in. Any decent venue has a zero-tolerance policy on harassment, so the staff there will act.
Delay
If the situation is too dangerous to challenge then and there (such as there is the threat of violence or you are outnumbered) just walk away. Wait for the situation to pass then ask the victim later if they are OK. Or report it when it’s safe to do so — it’s never too late to act.

In an emergency, call the police.

And remember, the University says, never put yourself in danger. Only intervene if safe to do so.

Final Thoughts

There are equivalent suggestions if you are the one who needs help. Try focusing on one person who is seemingly a bystander. Look them in the eye and ask them directly for help. Making your appeal personal like this makes it harder for people not to step in and help.

The bystander effect talks to the very essence of who we are as humans. It is very normal to freeze or fear an attack on someone else. But it is also core to our nature to want to help people who are in need. There are many techniques to do so safely. Being aware of the bystander effect and the ways to overcome them can be the difference to someone being attacked between life and death.