So I phoned the police and stayed with her for the next 20 minutes, until the police showed up. I was getting soaked in the rain and making myself late, but felt I owed it to her to stay put and make sure she came through it all OK. As I remounted my bike and rode away, it occurred to me that she didn't at any point thank me, and since then has made no attempt to contact me even though we discussed where I work (just across the road from her) as part of the small-talk. So in her own way, she was doing the same thing as the other drivers who had so upset her, albeit inadvertently. I probably wouldn't have stopped either, except she was literally blocking my path.
So it's easy to marvel at how disassociated we all are. A different thing entirely to do anything meaningful about it, even on a purely personal level. There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers, even less when there's a risk of being dragged into someone else's potentially violent confrontation. This is not a problem with phones, it's a problem with excessively large communities where we will probably never run into each other again. So why take the risk?
He was bouncing off the bottom to get air (he couldn't swim) but his face was turning blue, and he was making choking noises and frantically splashing. I tried to grab him, and pull him to the sandbar. He clawed onto me and began drowning me. I punched and pried and kicked underwater to get him off of me, and thanked God when I got him off and got ten feet away and got air again. I yelled for help. The people on the beach 100 yards away did nothing. Perhaps it was disbelief... I ran through the knee deep water as fast as I could to them and yelled for help as I got there. Nobody moved. I wasn't thinking, just moving, and there were those styrofoam noodles on the ground next to their blanket. I snatched one without saying a word and ran back to the water faster than I ever have before.
By the time I got to him it was ugly. He was still bouncing up from the bottom, but he was barely conscious, and his face looked like something from a horror movie. I've seen some horrific shit, but a drowning person at that stage looks like a zombie. He grabbed the noodle, and I pulled him the 15 feet or so to the sandbar. 15 feet, and it was knee deep water. He couldn't walk, and I picked him up fireman's style, and he was coughing out and puking water all down my back as I carried him to shore. This was the 90s, so there were no cell phones in the rural county I lived in. I ran into a house near the beach and had the ambulance come. He almost died later of a lung infection, but he's ok now.
I asked my dad that night why nobody helped. My dad told me that I was a "helper" like him. (he was a volunteer EMT his whole life, and a volunteer fireman. Plus I watched him help strangers all the time growing up.) "Most people aren't helpers." he said.
As I've gotten older, I figured out that is the case. And when you a helper, you have to help a lot. I don't know what it is, but basically maybe 80 to 90% of people don't do shit in these situations. They subconsciously don't even notice. And being a helper sucks, a lot, sometimes, but you still do it because you don't think you just do and your gut won't let you. You can't walk away because of some deep down feeling that you are subhuman if you do.
My worst helper experience was stopping a guy in a rural NC bar's parking lot from beating his girlfriend. I started fighting him, and his GF (who he had just been beating) smashed a bottle on my head. My vision went blurry, and she jumped on my back and I fell to the ground. They both then proceeded to beat the shit out of me on the gravel parking lot ground.
Now, I avoid going into the "hipster" neighborhoods of DC. As my wife pointed out, nobody in these neighborhoods is a helper. Helpers can't live in these neighborhoods long, because inevitably you end up getting sucked into this shit and you are always alone.
Did I oversimplify? Maybe. But that's my experience. I can't help but help people in trouble, and in urban and suburban areas, its probably a bad evolutionary strategy. In the country, not so much. People care there, and they reciprocate. This is probably due to such small social groups....... Wow, I ranted for a while.
I'm so sorry for this woman...... I wish I'd have been there.
I'd say "what in the actual fuck," but I know that those sorts of patterns are self-perpetuating and that since the woman was already in a place where she was allowing him to beat her, she'd fight to preserve status quo, as fucked up as that is. Did you first at least attempt to verbally stop him before you took it to the physical? Anyway, wow.
Good on you for stopping to help but why do you feel like you should have to gain something by helping someone else? The woman you helped was still probably quite shocked and dealing with police to thank you and it's highly likely that in such a situation information like where you worked completely went over her head.
I think this is one of the reasons people have stopped helping others - they expect something in return. If I helped someone the only thing I'd expect in return would be that if the person I helped is ever in a situation where they can provide help to someone else, they'll remember the time they were helped by a stranger and take action.
Side point
>> "There's not much to be gained from interacting with strangers, even less when there's a risk of being dragged into someone else's potentially violent confrontation."
The second part of this statement interests me. Is fear of something (that is highly unlikely to occur) a reason people don't get involved? It made me think of Michael Moore's conclusion in Bowling for Columbine that America's love of guns is based on fear that they will be attacked, mugged, home invaded etc. This may also be a reason people don't get involved in situation they can't control even though it's highly unlikely they are in any danger.
You say that as if it's a minor thing ("the only thing I'd expect") but you might be expecting someone to risk their life, get accused of rape by an unstable person, put themselves in danger of injury or lawsuit. It's not a trivial matter. I personally wasn't expecting anything from this person I helped, I was just pointing out that she ended up being no different from the other drivers around her - just less fortunate.
As Anderkent says, on a basic level, we're all expecting "something in return". We help other people, maybe they'll help us one day. But this instinct is tuned to small communities (in which we evolved) where "paying it forward" like this is very likely to occur in a short space of time. You help me carry my kill home, you can have some of the meat. You help me get my harvest in, I'll help you raise that barn. But in large communities (several million strong, in some cases) these opportunities will be limited so we are more reluctant to get involved. We might not be consciously weighing profit and loss, but on a subconscious or instinctive level, we are.
1) Your humanity and self-respect. It feels damnably good to know you've done something to help someone who needed it.
2) Serendipity. Maybe, just maybe, that person that you reach out to will somehow bless your life. Maybe they'll bite you. It's all experience, and a yarn to tell at the least.
I don't think that it's that people expect something in return, it's that society has increasingly pushed in the direction of passive consumption, of observation, of spectacle, and the actions of others on a flickering screen providing the ersatz satisfaction of actual action.
I witness this variety of thing all too frequently - someone's in trouble, and a crowd stands, and watches, much as they would the same events on television.
I can at least live in good conscience that I always step in to help, consequences be damned - and yes, I've had my share of negative consequences - lawsuit from a girl who was being beaten senseless by her "man", for intervening and causing her to scrape her knee (never mind the blood gushing from her face by the time I showed up) - lawsuit from a guy who had an epileptic fit, and I phoned for an ambulance, resulting in him being arrested on an outstanding warrant - and arrest and a broken nose for breaking up a bar-fight. Plenty else too, but those were the major ones.
Such is life, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't.
People always expected something in return, the thing that changes is that you no longer get it. In a small community, you're likely to meet the person you helped again, and thus leaving them stranded will definitely bite you. Not so in the current huge cities.
You say 'if I helped someone the only thing I'd expect in return would be that if the person I helped is ever in a situation where they can provide help to someone else, they'll remember the time they were helped by a stranger and take action', but is this sufficient motivation for you to actually go out and help people?
Having never truly experienced trauma (closest I came was a low-speed car collision on college campus) I find it fascinating how the victim suspends empathy during trauma. For me, empathy is nearly constant, so it is difficult for me to grasp a state where it wouldn't be so, as ironic as that is for someone with empathy!
As for why people don't help strangers more often than not... I believe this behavior is supported by our modern society. We've institutionalized helping people. Through taxes, we provide emergency response teams like Fire and Police departments. We provide medical, food, and housing assistance to many in need - at least the ones willing to ask for it. And yes - some assistance is volunteer, such as soup kitchens and volunteer fire departments, but I do believe the trend to be real... Taxpayers pay others to help people for them. Helpers in this society get monetary compensation.
1. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf
The only people that will help you is family and friends.
Risking your life, safety or just wasting time for the sake of helping a stranger happens as often as people donating large amounts to charity.
So if you want to fight your robber you better have a large knife or gun on your person because people won't help you.
I'm not saying I agree (or disagree) with that advice, but there are good reasons for not getting involved.
Are we to suggest that community support is as vestigial as the tailbone?
I currently live in Taiwan and just yesterday there was a subway stabbing - a 20s male started stabbing people on the subway. Naturally, reactions was slow as most people was playing their phones or getting some shut eye. He managed to kill 4 people, get off the subway and intimidate more people, before finally brought down by a 62 elder man.
Everyone can be armchair quarterbacks, shake their heads in disappointment, raise their fits in anger, but when you are in a situation such as the above, or witness a knife attack - you are stunned. Taipei is one of the safest city in Asia. Most of us don't see scenes such as this except on TV, and most of us don't know how to react. It's fight/intervene or flight/stay out of it.
I've taken defence classes, including Krav Maga and they all emphasize that knives are the most deadly weapon in the world due to its ease of access and the damage it can do.
Sorry it happened to the OP but I don't think society has 'become' anything. There's no proof that people are more willing to jump between a knife wielding maniac and a victim before the iPhone age.
Nowadays, people like me wouldn't know the first thing about hitting someone or defending themselves. My childhood home was in what we'd consider "a bad area" of a Southern European city (mafia and all that) but even there it took very little care to stay out of trouble. I don't think I've ever been in a physical confrontation with anyone after my 18th birthday; I wouldn't know how to use a knife or a gun, nor how to protect myself from it. Law enforcement and cultural pressure are now so efficient that they can usually limit violent activity to specific areas, so as long as I stay away from those, I'm very likely to be safe. (Every city has different attitudes and problems, of course, but that's more or less true for most of them)
If a random stranger started knifing people in my subway carriage, I'd probably freeze too - I'm a family man, not a goddamn soldier or street-fighter. Same for witnessing something like what OP describes.
edit: OK, I'm being downvoted. That's fine. But, why put your irreplaceable life in mortal danger for the sake of keeping hold of replaceable consumer electronics? That's the disconnect I'm finding hard to process.
Someone should have helped her, but with hindsight she didn't want to give up her own electronics and wanted someone else to risk their life for her things.
But this situation is also very traumatic for her so there could be any number of reasons why she chose not to just hand her phone over.
I definitely can understand her being angry, but this isn't really an issue about people not paying attention as much as it is bystander effect (it seems).
Also, although it may be beside the point, you could argue that giving them what they want will just increase muggings. The way to sort out the problem is to relax laws around people helping out victims in cases like this.
I downvoted you because, like the other top posts, your post managed to gather downvotes via emotional appeal, while posts that point out the actual social source of this behavior along with simple and effective advice on how to circumvent it, are left in the middle of this comment section due to lack of emotional appeal.
Yes, the second option did not work as planned, and it is the main point of the article.
And also, did the OP not consider the potential consequences of throwing a boiling drink in the face of another person armed with a knife?
Intend? In the trivial sense, you can guess; in the broad, unknowable.
-- Minimum: you'll miss the day of work, have an arrest on your record which you'll have to disclose forever and which may cost you your career, may make it impossible to enter foreign countries, and so on.
-- Probable: you'll miss many days of work due to police/legal complications. Significant chance of losing your job. Significant chance of grievous personal injury. Significant chance of assault charges which will cost you (minimum) tens of thousands of dollars to defend against (more likely >$100,000).
-- Possible: Killed by knife. Killed by cop. Jailed for assault. Jailed for murder (if attacker ends up dead, you're going to be charged for sure). Newspaper columnist heaps scorn on your actions.
-- Benefits, maximum: a newspaper mentions your name in a good way. Victim says "thank you".
Yes, everyone is wondering if someone else will intervene. But also, individually, the calculus for intervening is just terrible. Highly likely consequences include months in the hospital, months in jail, cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The joke about a knife fight is that the winner is in the hospital, the loser in the morgue. Which one of those two will you be?
I, being in an orthopedic boot, was unable to move at anything more than a quick hobble.
When the police come to sort out an altercation in progress, everyone involved is going to get tackled, rolled face down, have a cop kneel on your neck with his entire body weight, have your arms wrenched behind your back, and placed in handcuffs. That is the best, least physical outcome possible.
Google: "victim sues rescuer" [1]
I could have just called the police, but that doesn't really help in an immediate situation of one person trying to stab someone. So this situation calls for either: 1) Subduing the attacker by pinning them. 2) Doing enough damage to the attacker that they can't move. If they are on top of the victim, they maybe are in a good position for me to run up and corner-kick their head and end things with a quick concussion. I can't tell from the prose. Otherwise, it would be better to just restrain her and pin her to the ground.
So I'm either a man pinning screaming woman to the ground in a public place or a man who is viscously beating a woman in public.
No thanks, "Real Men" don't hit girls. http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/brand-what-do-you...
Especially not in public where "defend the woman being attacked" is a fantasy for a whole bunch of people.
> I'm [..] a man pinning screaming woman to the ground in a public place
I can just imagine how this goes down. You grab the perpetrator, wrestle her to the ground violently. You have to lean deeply over her to restrain both her hands. The victim runs away. The woman you're holding starts to scream and shout that you're assaulting her. The police arrive.
You are fucked with a capital F.
> a man [..] beating a woman in public
... the victim runs away. The police arrive. The police tell the other guys in the holding cell that you're a woman-beater.
You get the picture.
1) Your reality changes. At any point, in every street, someone/some gang can step up and change your situation to something vastly different than the reality the other people around you are in at that moment.
2) Nobody cares. People don't want to get involved. They are not aware of the situation, or even when they are, they are not in it themselves. As a woman you might have the luck of a knight in shiny armour nearby who feels obliged to step up and help, but as a fit male, all bets are off. Few want to get between "men fighting" – to them you are a perpetrator, not a victim.
The loneliness and absurdity of such situations are hard to get over. Years later I'm still more aware of my environment whenever I'm out, and I always check for exits and whom not to turn my back to. It has also made me more likely to reach out and help others in such situations, partly because I can relate, and partly because I'm more aware that something doesn't feel quite right.
You must learn to accept that if you have belongings, you might lose them. Or alternatively, be willing to pointlessly fight like hell with a random stranger for little or no benefit. The second option might cost a hell of a lot more overall, even when you "win".
It's partly bystander effect ("I'll leave it to someone else to intervene") and partly a very real fear of the intervention going wrong. Maybe you get stabbed. Maybe the police get involved and you end up with an assault conviction and consequent expulsion from the middle class. Maybe the scene isn't all it seems (setup for robbery, or domestic where both parties turn on the intervenor).
Commuting and the mass-population city kind of relies on us forming the habit of studiously ignoring one another, and it's a hard habit to shake in an emergency.
Taking justice in your own hand - helping people out in a violent situation - is frowned upon and discouraged. Perhaps even moreso in the US, where it's much more likely that people carry guns and people - bystanders or those directly involved - get killed.
But as I'm sure is mentioned elsewhere, the main causes of inaction are the exceptionality of the situation (despite what the media wants you to believe) and a group mentality (nobody's doing anything, so why should I? Alternatively, maybe the group is seeing something I haven't, could be dangerous)
I don't normally do this but extraordinary claims need evidence. Citation?
And when you read more on many of those assault charges, you realize there's more to the story. Some I've seen:
Man's alarm and CCTV system alerts him to intruder. He doesn't call 911, but plans ambush, injures burglar, and only then summons help.
Man alerted to burglar as burglar is leaving premises, shoots burglar in back as burglar has left home but not property, attempts to claim he felt his life in danger, even though the burglar had not discovered him, and was in fact leaving the premises.
I was in a similar situation once and just gave up my phone and mug money. I was somewhat prepared because I was warned it would happen. Maybe this book saved my life http://www.roughguides.com/shop/rough-guide-new-york-city/ As I was pulled into a dark alley, a young woman walked by like it was completely normal to see someone mugged. Then I packed my things and left NY and never looked back.
wikipedia entry here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
long story short, what's going on in people's minds when they don't help is that, probably someone else will step in, and playing hero will probably just get in the way.
which, isn't that helpful if 100% of the bystanders are thinking that. It's somebody else's problem.
there's a simple remedy- Don't scream "help! anyone! help!" scream "Hey you, burly looking dude. Help! yes you!" ' This is what psychologists say. until the evidence comes in, I'm skeptical that it would work. but it's better than repeating these stories again and again.
Exactly this. The same goes for calling emergency services - there are cases where response was delayed because everyone was assuming someone else was doing it. I've been the one person who did it before, I'd say due to having an understanding of this. It's really something people should be taught about in school and how to avoid both participating in it and letting it happen.
As an aside, apparently she pretty much did what you suggest (which is the standard advice to deal with the bystander effect) in that she asked one particular bystander to help her, but even that didn't work.
If so, irresponsible experiment/theatre, and they have only themselves to blame if someone did get tripped/punched/rugby tackled/hit with martial arts moves/arrested. The fact that nobody did any of those is the main problem - if someone did, many people would have felt more confident too, both at not being caught up in police issues around it, but also via a safety in numbers instinct.
Is this hypothesis testable?
Pretty easy to test yourself: Walk into a random aisle in a grocery store and say "Can anyone help me?" Elsewhere, point to an employee and say "can YOU help me?" Observe difference in results.
This is the way things are in 2014.
The common rule is that men don't hit women, so if they start attacking you (which, hypocritically is perfectly okay), you can only hope to defend yourself. Was it a man though, you could fight back, but that still means you've just put yourself in danger by trying to help.
I can somewhat understand not getting involved with strangers - you don't know if the apparent victim is actually the instigator or even if the two are pulling a scam together. But if I even peripherally knew a woman and she told me she was being robbed at knifepoint, I would hope I wouldn't leave her to her fate like this guy did.
I would at least take my own dummy wallet out and give it to the mugger in exchange for leaving everyone alone. It has about $20 and a bunch of used up American Express gift cards in it.
But you know what doesn't suck? The honor culture. (to be fair, its the root of a LOT of bad things too) You are taught from birth that if you don't protect those weaker than yourself (provided they aren't gay or non-white, since of course this IS the south.... sigh) you are not a worthy human being.
Not helping a person you know who is in dire need is the lowest of the lowest of the low. You learn this as a kid. If you see my previous comment, I'm not armchair quarterbacking here, I've actually helped people, and had some very bad things and good things happen as a result.
Of course, someone else on here pointed out how much less violent society has become, and how we no longer know how to react to it. I think this is true, which explains my whole theory on southerners, since the southern U.S. has much, much higher rates of violence amongst both blacks and whites than the other parts of the country.
For me to risk my life for you, I would have to know you somewhat well, and then I would very likely intervene.
It's not only the bystander effect, but also the quite rational question "do I want to risk my own life for the sake of this woman I don't know, in this situation I know very little about?"
Once, my friend intervened in two drunk girls fighting each other. He was calm, but instead they just turned against him.
It's simply a game of pros and cons, and I can very much follow the community thing that Anderkent mentions in another thread.
One is diffusion of responsibility or bystander effects, which I think she's hinting at. In a crowd an individual is less likely to take action. I think this has a lot to do with our social instincts. Being in a crowd of strangers is a new thing. We aren't built for it.
On our own, we make decisions for ourselves. That's easy. A group is supposed to be a family or troop or somesuch. These will usually have a leader. Someone responsible for deciding that this is a mugging, that we're on the victim's side and that we are going to join the fight. I'm not sure it has to be a literal leader, but there needs to be a pre-established decision making process and the individual needs to know where they stand in it.
A second issue is that this is not really a question of "willingness to help" in the intellectual sense. It's a question of instinct.
A third is that in a city (or in modern life in general) we are surrounded by other people's problems. The homeless person we step over, the domestic violence sounds we don't call the cops on, the volunteer help line where we don't volunteer at and the charity we don't contribute to.
This is complicated. I think it's more about living in cities, nations and the global village than it is about iphones.
If you have a dog with an injured paw then different people will willingly help you (dog lovers) than those people that will willingly help you find a lost cat (cat lovers). Same with directions, some random tourist might not be as willing to help you with directions as a native, the tourist could probably get the maps out on their phone, but they will not feel as if that is the thing to do. However, if you were lost in their home town then they might walk you to where you needed to go.
As a cyclist I often help other cyclists with flat tyres etc. and you try stopping me from helping out. I spent a decade working in the cycle trade so, for me, fixing someone else's bike is merely an opportunity to keep my skills fresh. I cannot say that first aid is my thing, however, I am sure that someone else will keep the patient warm until the authorities arrive, so I auto-delegate myself to warning traffic and collecting debris from the road in such circumstances. Because I don't do cars, I am unlikely to offer to bump start someone's car or help them back in if they have locked their keys inside. However, others that have those skills will take up the opportunity to help.
When it comes to violent confrontational circumstances, there was a time when I would have a go, however, after getting my head kicked in by four muggers I no longer feel inclined to get involved. However, I do have friends that have been doormen and they will leap to the opportunity to do a little bit of enforcing - it is in their skill set.
Most people are willing and able to help out if they can and if they have confidence in their usefulness in a given situation. The problem is that when there is some rare and outrageous act of violence going on that there are very few people around who have 'enforcing' in their skill set. Hence the apparent 'bystander effect'.
"..we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world."
Why do we even have an expectation that someone in the street will help us any more than we have an expectation that someone in a different country would help us.
The majority of us have, right now, the ability to help someone with similarly urgent problems. Medical or nutritional. There are still people campaign out after their house got blown away in the Philipines earthquake.
Thinking about this as "not my area" is an anonymous mentality. Like saying "I support education projects. I don't know anything about refugee projects." She is asking "Why didn't you behave like my friends and neighbors"
We could help them without endangering ourselves. If I was one the the bystanders who didn't help this person, I would feel ashamed. Is this sentiment a vestige?
Luckily, Google's cache has a copy already:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:m0OtEZT...
Another thing to consider is getting a gun or at least supporting gun rights. Not a lot of unarmed people are going to help you against a crazy person with a knife. If someone was caring a gun, they could have helped. If she were caring, then she could have put an end to this nightmare herself.
There's a saying in the gun rights community, "The second you need a cop, they're always minutes away." All the cops I know agree with that statement. It's not a reflection on them, just that they can't be everywhere all the time.
I hope her injuries (both physical and mental) heal quickly.
No, that is not how it would work out in most (if not all) cases. Especially not in such a public place. And especially not if the gun was contained in something, e.g. her purse.
Even if that person were a great shot, in a (even moderately) close combat fight with a knife-wielder, she would most likely not be able to pull/unlock the gun before being stabbed, or miss and/or hit others or just be plain too scared/untrained to keep that much control.
Even if it worked, there would be the question of ethics and legality of wounding/killing another person to save her possessions. The legality may not be an issue in (many states in) the US, but even there not always a clear case and most likely will have some legal procedure.
If she were able to use the gun for intimidation and get the assailant to run away, that might work, but the attacker is obviously beyond quite some normal mental restrictions when threatening to kill her in a public place and might not easily be deterred.
Guns are the perfect tool for killing people when you know you want/plan to kill people. They are effective in wounding too, if you're able to hit where it doesn't kill. They are mostly useless in not getting wounded/killed by someone who wants to wound/kill you.
In fact, most people who own guns are well trained. I can also assure you that even under stress you can hit a human sized target from 15 feet very easily.
Most of the state laws about even brandishing a fire arm have to do with inescapable life threatening harm, meaning you can't just run away. In the blogger's case she couldn't run due to an injury, but based on her description she would have had time to properly use a gun in defense and it would have been legal for her to do so in my state of MA.
I was trained by a former police detective and told in a knife situation, if you couldn't escape, draw your weapon, yell stop or I will shoot, then shoot if they're within 15 feet and move toward you at all.
>Even if it worked, there would be the question of ethics
Ethics? Someone threatens to kill you, has a deadly weapon, and is coming at you and you think there's still an ethical issue? Sure, they're crazy and sure, you could choose to let them kill you because you pity them, but I doubt that makes you ethically superior.
I think part of the explanation is that such situations occur pretty rarely in the developed world, so people do not know what's the appropriate reaction: Fight back and risk getting attacked as well, scream for help, just call the police? It probably can be compared to first-aid situations, where most people seem to get completely paralyzed and are unable to help the injured person. Maybe governments should offer seminars where people learn to react properly in such situations, just like in the first-aid seminars that you're required to attend when you get your driving license.
Where do you live that you're required to take a first-aid class before you get your driver's license? That sounds like a freaking fantastic idea!
The thing that I remember most from the course was this: "Don't be afraid to perform cardiac massage on someone that doesn't breathe even if you might hurt him (e.g. by breaking some of his bones), after all if you do nothing he's already as good as dead.".
We seen people throw themselves in front of cars then demand cash from the driver, destroy restrooms in fast food joints, and just sit the street talking incoherently to themselves. We were there for less than a week.
I wondered if perhaps while we've not been great at reducing homelessness here, we have better support for those with acute mental illness.
I know every large city has its problems, and I absolutely loved visiting SF (I'd go back in a heartbeat), but seeing this just made me sad.
I've had this habit for about a year. So far, called the police too late to do anything about it twice (once because my phone was dead, once from a combination of negligence and not knowing the right number to call), and once called the emergency number for a guy who fainted in public (but ran off before help could arrive). In the last case, a handful of other bystanders also stopped to help the guy, so bystander effect mysteriously didn't work that day. So I haven't been terribly helpful to anyone, but I was surprised how often I saw problems once I was looking for it.
(I don't think I would have been terribly helpful in this situation, though - I don't know how to break up a fight without being hurt, and probably wouldn't have thought of some of the better ideas like trying to single out a strong-looking person in the crowd and get them to help.)
I've lived in different countries and have seen different reactions where people are used to feeling responsible for their peers because they know the government doesn't care, is not efficient, or otherwise limited.
Of course, some people will also be reluctant to get stabbed for a complete stranger.
I admit I never would have helped besides maybe removing myself from the scene and calling authorities because the chances are high I'd be charged with assault myself, hurt, detained by police, etc.. Once you get an arrest you are effectively impossible to hire for most companies the rest of your life.
This is an example of the real world. Its nothing new, nor likely to change. History is full of "bad things" happening to people, on a large and small scale, that happened because others did nothing to stop it.
My comment does not mean that people should not help others who are in need, but suggesting this is something new - possibly due to changes in technology - reinforces the (wrong) idea that people think the world is a safe place.
OP also didn't react as hindsight tells us the answer. Hand it over. Why did they value something crappy like money over their life, are they so superficial? (Probably not)
We've been told a million times just to hand it over, but OP still didn't.
Concentrate on the long term issues, there are more and they are solvable through logic, like solving homelessness.
Don't worry so much about how people react in unexpected situations. Worry more about peoples long term decision making, that scares me.
I had the largest presentation of my life that night for a public audience of 200 people and letting my company and CTO down. I couldn't imagine losing all of my things and not being able to do so. Yes it was a very selfish driver at the time, but my brain couldn't move beyond that thought.
1) Believe that your intervention will do good/be effective.
2) Have a personal relationship with the victim.
3) Be thinking of the victim as a person rather than a piece of the scenery.
4) Perceive the risk to self (legal/physical) to be low.
5) Don't believe someone else will do it.
6) Don't believe that it's a setup where the 'victim' will turn on you.
I'm not saying those are the things that matter, they're just the things that came to mind.
And how many of them typically apply?
This was a knife attack, and that probably takes care of 1 and 4. I've seen untrained people fighting in the street, and it's the equivalent of a monkey slinging shit. Add to that that a knife is less to do with careful application of skill - it's more constant. It's entirely possible, if people had intervened, we'd be talking about multiple people seriously injured, perhaps scarred for life, or killed.
2 doesn't apply, 3 could go either way, 5 might be the case - there were a lot of people there. 6, happens, but again might go either way.
...
And there's a thought - did they see the knife? or did they just see two people having a domestic and screaming at each other? I imagine that might decrease the chances of anything happening.
There was a group of about 12-15 high school age girls and 10 of them were just watching 3 or 4 of them gang up on 1 of them.
WTF do I do here? I had the same thought process as many people in this thread. I could get involved, but realistically, there's absolutely no way I'm going to go try to break up a fight with that many people in it, let alone teenage girls.
I watched for about 5 seconds before I started to get my phone out to call the cops (which I also felt bad about b/c... wtf are they going to do... something needs to happen now).
Luckily for the kid, she managed to get away and they stopped pursuing her. But man, the feeling of helplessness sucked pretty hard.
Really? Have you SEEN the homeless population there? Who the fuck is helping them?
> But what the hell was that? I’ve read all the psychology books. I know the typical explanations.
....then why are you asking? It's bystander effect, plain and simple. If you're expecting San Franciscans to go against human nature just because they write code, sorry, ain't gonna happen.
Get some pepper spray and some self defense classes and learn to fight dirty. Don't blame other people for not saving you; they have no obligation to.
> Is this how disconnected from the real world we’ve become?
It's how disconnected the author has become. I'm glad she's now got perspective on how the real world works. (I'm also glad she came out of that safe and sound; sounds like a really scary fucked up situation)
I tried an experiment once quite recently on a train trip, to try and ask some young hysterical girl to calm herself down ( she was basically insulting everybody). What happend was this : seing that someone did something made the other passengers decided to act and speak their mind as well. The problem is that some guy decided to go physical on her and hit her on the face. I had to ask for help stopping him this time.
My conclusion was that :
1/ it only takes one person to make all the other personn move as well.
2/ you have to be really carefull because depending on the level of anger of the crowd, things can get extremely violent.
There is no way I would have intervened. I am a male and I can't see my involvement in the situation working out for me at all. Now you might say I'm wrong for putting my self-preservation above that on Kristen's but this isn't just about preventing physical harm to myself. In fact if I knew that I would only be cut (non-fatal) then I wouldn't have this stance. Instead I am worried about the ramifications of "attacking" a women in public like this.
We have seen countless times in the media where someone coming to the aid of someone in danger (not in an attack situation) has been sued for helping (just google "rescuer sued"). So if trying to help someone alone can get you screwed just think about what can happen when there are two people involved. What assurances do I have that I won't inadvertently hurt Kristen in the process and that she won't decide to sue me? Or that the attacker in this situation won't sue me for "attacking her" while trying to prevent her from stabbing Kristen (google "attacker sues victim")? I'll tell you: NONE. For all we know the attacker will sue Kristen for throwing hot coffee on her, this story isn't over yet.
Let's examine an example:
I intervene, I kick the attacker in the head to get her off Kristen. Let's ignore for now the chance that a bystander only see's me kick this women in the head and assumes it was unprovoked and then attacks me. Then Kristen gets up, shakily thanks me and the disappears into the crowd. I am left standing over the body of a women that I just physically assaulted. A bystander had pulled out their phone to film what was happening but only caught me kicking the women. If I leave the scene then there is a chance I will be hunted down and if I stay at the very least I am going to spend the rest of the day at the police station. The attacker stuffers brain damage from the kick and the family sues me for all I'm worth and I spend the rest of my life paying off the debt while waking up daily to the thought of "No good deed...".
I understand this is a worst case outcome but there is no way in hell I am going to risk my life AND if I survive the remainder of my life over a $600 phone and the contents of her bag, it simply is not worth it. I'd cover those costs with my first meeting with an attorney. If the attacker was actually stabbing Kristen then it would be a different story but that's not what happened. I've talked to people trained in various martial arts and the vast majority of them say that if they were mugged they would hand over their belongings. Mind you these are people trained to fight (whereas I can assure you I have no such training) but they know their lives are not worth their possessions.
TL;DR: A phone and purse are not worth the victims or a potential rescuers life (both immediate and long term)
I know it is Man -> Women and Women -> Man but I think it neatly illustrates my point. And I think we can assume:
* 2 women fighting -> Public doesn't care
* women fighting man -> Public doesn't care
* man fighting women -> Public cares and will get involved
I think you are assuming too much when you assume a bystander won't attack a man attacking a women in public.
"suddenly we were brawling, she swinging at me with a knife in one hand"
"I felt blood flowing down my face. 'SOMEBODY HELP ME!' People stare and watch."
"Please, she’s got a knife, she’s trying to stab me, please! ANYONE!"
Seems to me that it was pretty clear that actual knife attacking was taking place. She's got blood streaming down her face crying blue murder about a girl with a knife - you wouldn't help because she hadn't actually been stabbed yet?
How would you live with yourself?
Posted this in her reply... 'Nuff said...
Plus people are sheep, if not a single person is crazy enough to start and help someone else, then most of the time nobody will.
It's just getting that first person.
Just in case some of you here were losing faith in bystanders worldwide. ;-]
It is a "bystander intervention" and "diffusion of responsibility" human-psychology problem. Both of those are Googleable terms and both have practical solutions in how to bypass them; unfortunately, typically only people who've taken some Psych coursework are aware of them.
Compounding this is the fact that there are MANY crazy homeless people in San Francisco, so you tend to automatically filter unusual behavior out.
It's our bill of rights that prevents us from forcing help on these people and, while it's sad for them, I rather like our strict policy on NOT being able to just call someone crazy and force them into an institution.
These kind of people are going to carry weapons no matter what, and I for one don't want to be again in a situation where I'm unable to defend myself or somebody else.
I really understand the arguments behind prohibition and could agree with them, but the integrity of my loved ones comes first.
