Distract, support, ask for help
How to intervene
When communications student Lydia still lived in the Peperstraat, she regularly saw bad things happening. ‘I remember one thing in particular. There was this couple, a guy and a girl, having an argument under my window. He hit her really hard, she hit him back... And then he threw her on the ground and started kicking her in the stomach.’
No one on the busy street did anything, not even the couple’s four friends nearby. Suddenly, Lydia had an idea: ‘I threw some water out my window and started yelling stuff at them. I had to redirect their attention somehow’, she recalls.
After a while, the man stopped kicking his girlfriend. ‘But I don’t think he stopped because of me.’ Before Lydia had time to come up with something else, the group left.
Doing nothing
Many students have witnessed verbal altercations, violence, or threatening situations at one time or another. Most incidents take place on a night out, but sometimes it involves colleagues getting bullied or fellow students yelling at lecturers. What are you supposed to do in these cases?
If I might endanger myself, I’d rather stay out of it
Most of the time, people don’t really know what to do. Psychology student Jonathan Poncet recently saw a man threatening a woman in the middle of the Vismarkt: ‘I thought about stepping in, but the guy looked much stronger than I was. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. Fortunately, that’s when the police arrived.’
His fellow student Tessa was also afraid to intervene when she heard a woman yell ‘Leave me alone!’ at a man who was following her. ‘I was like, why am I not doing anything? But I didn’t feel safe enough.’
‘If I feel like I might endanger myself, I’d rather stay out of it’, says international relations student Pleun van der Vorst.
Fear
It’s common for people to hesitate intervening in situations like these, even when they can see someone needs help, says Marloes Siccama. During the active-bystander courses she teaches at the UG and other places, she instructs people on what to do in case of harassment in public, bullying in the classroom or at work, or a physical altercation on the street.
‘Sometimes, you have to think of your own safety first’, she says. ‘People often don’t get involved because of fear, in the broadest sense of the word: if someone is being bullied, they’re worried they might become the bully’s next target, for instance.’
Sometimes, people don’t want to get involved because the behaviour is normalised, as is often the case in hazing rituals gone awry, or because they don’t want to be seen as ‘making a fuss’. ‘They tend to think it’s none of their business’, says Siccama.
But being an active bystander doesn’t have to be complicated at all, she emphasises. ‘Most times, you don’t even have to do very much; you just have to be there to de-escalate the situation.’
Distract and delegate
However, it can be difficult to know what to do in the moment. ‘Sometimes, we freeze up; we want to do something, but we don’t know what’, she explains. ‘Doing nothing isn’t an option, however, and the sooner you do something, the better.’
Sometimes you just have to be there to de-escalate the situation
Lydia certainly had the right idea in throwing water at people and yelling. According to Siccama, distracting people is a great way of breaking up an altercation. ‘One thing you could do is pretend to know someone, go up to them and say “Hey, long time no see!” Or you could just ask them if everything’s okay.’
Another way of stepping in without actually directly getting involved is to delegate. ‘Say you’re in a club and something’s going on. You can ask yourself if you know these people. Do I know their friends, and can I ask them to intervene?’
There’s a good chance these friends have a better shot at de-escalating the situation than you do, says Siccama. Calling the police or finding bar staff are other forms of delegation.
Delayed help
But what if there’s nobody else around and you’re hesitant to interfere in an argument? Student Cara - a pseudonym - encountered this problem when she worked in a clothing shop. The store was being inspected and the woman started screaming at her manager. ‘She was clearly taking it too far and I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. It was my job and they were both my superiors.’
We tend to forget that we can ask other people for help
In cases like these, Siccama says, the best thing to do is offer support afterwards. It’s called delayed help. ‘Asking if they’re okay can also function as aftercare, reassuring the victim that they’re not alone. The whole thing can be summed up with the four Ds’, says Siccama: ‘Direct action, distract, delegate, and delay.’
Additionally, collaboration is always key. ‘We tend to forget that we can ask other people for help, whether it’s out on the street or somewhere else’, she says. ‘Active bystanders need active bystanders of their own.’
Impact
So what happens when you decide to intervene? Siccama warns that people tend to respond annoyed or even defensive. ‘They often feel personally attacked. When that happens, you can tell them that they don’t have to agree with you, but that you just wanted to point out their behaviour. Maybe they can give it some more thought later. It’s ultimately not about the intention of what you do, but the impact.’
In the end, Lydia feels good about the fact that she at least did something. ‘When I see nobody else doing anything, I feel obligated to take action. I’d want people to do the same for me.’
Would you like to take an active-bystander course? The UG offers courses in both English and Dutch.
The bystander effect
It’s been touted as truth for so long that almost everyone believes it: the larger the group of bystanders in an emergency or criminal situation, the smaller the chance that any of them intervene. But as an extensive study based on surveillance footage from the Netherlands, Great Britain, and South Africa from 2019 showed, in reality, it’s the other way around,
In 90 percent of cases, people did in fact intervene, and the more bystanders there are, the greater the chance at least one person took action, says Virginia Pallante with the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement. She was responsible for the Dutch part of the study.
Lab situations
The theory of the bystander effects has its roots in the sixties, based on an incident that took place in New York. A woman, Kitty Genovese, was stabbed to death surrounded by bystanders who didn’t do anything. But it later turned out that the incident had been entirely misconstrued. For one, someone had in fact called the police, and follow-up studies that supported the theory were entirely based on laboratory situations. ‘Whereas we observed what actually went on in the streets’, says Pallante.
The researchers are now trying to determine which factors push people to intervene. Perhaps the presence of other witnesses makes people more likely to step in. ‘Doing something about the situation is in our human nature, even if people aren’t sure about what they’re doing or how to intervene.’
Collective action
Another interesting outcome was that the more aggressive the attacker is and the more obvious pain the victim is in, the faster people intervene. ‘The risk of a bystander getting hurt is also much smaller than we thought, a different study showed. And that risk gets even lower as more people intervene.’
Taking joint action is very effective, says Pallante. ‘What we observe from the cameras is that someone intervenes, but then there’s a lot of other people doing something after this first intervention. So this collective action really helped to handle the whole situation.’