I have written in several Substack submissions about caring and helping, and I have also used the term active bystandership. What does that mean? I call a witness or bystander a person, or a group of people, who are in a position to know of some need and in a position to take action to respond to that need. A passive bystander does not take action, or even tries to avoid knowing about the need. An active bystander responds, to alleviate the need or stop harmful action. A person who notices someone drowning and jumps in to save that person is, of course, an active bystander.
Evidence of witnesses or bystanders who avoid knowing comes from one of my studies. I had students from Harvard University, where I taught at that time, collapse one at a time on a quiet Cambridge street as a bystander was passing by. Some bystanders immediately rushed over, some hesitated, but a fairly small group looked away after a single glance and continued to walk on, and most of them turned off the street at the next corner. I found that leaders and whole nations often behave that way when there is violence against a group in neighboring countries, or even in their own societies.
One focus in my work has been to point to the tragedy of passivity among bystanders.
Once harmful behavior begins, without actions to inhibit it, it tends to evolve, to continue and increase in magnitude. People justify harm done to victims, and their increasingly negative views of them allow continued and increased harmdoing.
In Nazi Germany, once people found out that the so-called euthanasia program (which means mercy killing but actually it was a eugenics program to eliminate “genetically imperfect” Germans) was killing people’s relatives, there was an outcry. Relatives and religious authorities spoke out against it. The Nazi government to a large extent terminated the program. But there was no such outcry about the killing of Jews; I know of only one instance of active bystandership against that. When the Jewish husbands of German women were taken to Auschwitz, a group of women protested in front of government buildings. The deportations stopped and some men already in Auschwitz were brought back. Some scholars argued that the Nazis so hated the Jews this was effective only because the Nazi leaders did not want to alienate the population in the midst of a war. We don’t know whether such actions could have been more widely effective, because there seemed to be no other instances of a group of Germans protesting Jewish persecution.
I have trained people in active bystandership. I and some associates trained high school students to intervene when fellow students harm other students, to prevent this or if it is already ongoing, to stop it. Afterwards harmdoing reported by students both toward other students and toward themselves declined, in comparison to similar schools where we did not do the training. In 1992, on the invitation of the California Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST), after the Rodney King incident, I developed a training for officers to intervene, to prevent or stop unnecessary harmful behavior by their fellow officers. In the Rodney King incident, in 1991, after a car chase, Rodney King was pulled out of his car and, while he was lying on the ground, a couple of officers beat him with their batons. By that time several police cars have arrived, and 17 officers were standing around, watching this and doing nothing. Someone from a balcony filmed this, gave the film to a television station, and it went viral around the world.
I delivered that bystandership training to a combined group of civilians and police charged with making recommendations on how to train police so that such things wouldn’t happen. They strongly recommended its use it in all police training, from field officers to executive development. But POST did not seem to do much with it. However my associates and I later used it in New Orleans, where police had engaged in many instances of unnecessary violence against civilians. The then fairly new Police Superintendent Michael Harrison welcomed it. This had very good effects, with many instances of intervention. Even minor acts stopped violence. For example, an officer put an arm around the shoulder of a fellow officer when he seemed to be about to charge a group of demonstrators. Two of my associates on that project subsequently started an organization called ABLE (Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement) and several of us who worked together in New Orleans (Jonathan Aronie, Joel Dvoskin, Mary Howell, Christie Lopez) and others are now training over 380 police departments in the US. This training also addresses in various ways the well-being of officers.
I have intervened myself in a few instances. Once, in front of a shopping mall, from a distance, I saw an older teenager with his arm around the neck of a younger one, seemingly choking him. A group of people was standing around them, not doing anything. I ran toward them, shouting, “stop that!” He did and then walked away. Another time at a mall, a very big man similarly had his arm around the neck of a somewhat smaller man. Again I shouted but to no effect. I tried to pull the arm of the man off the neck of the other man and could not. Then another very big man did it. I experienced this a number of times: when one person tries to help, others join. I also suggest in trainings that a person turn to others and invite them to be allies in stopping harmful behavior.
I will mention a couple more matters. Intervening when a family member is being abused has tremendous benefits. My trauma therapist colleagues tell me that traumatized individuals are especially affected when they are aware that someone from their family, like the other parent, was aware that they were being abused and did not do anything. Also, in working around the world, e.g., in Rwanda to promote healing and reconciliation after the 1994 genocide, one aspect of our work has been to help people understand the origins of genocide or other group violence. When there is increasing derogation of a potential target group, or limited violence against its members, people can say to themselves that this will pass, they don’t need to do anything. But if they come to understand that such things evolve and become much worse without inhibiting influences, they may be more likely to consider how they can join with others to try to stop the evolution.
In our society also, it is essential for people to be active bystanders who try to stop the evolution of increasing hostility between different groups. That requires exerting influence on people to vote. It requires challenging people who don’t realize the danger of someone who says, “I will be a dictator on day one,” and ‘I will deport huge numbers of people and put many others into concentration camps,’ who calls people vermin and plans to weaponize the Justice Department against people who have opposed him. I consider it also active bystandership for someone to research and show the many ways Mr. Trump, over the years, ripped off people, not paying them for work they have done, or in other ways. A good society requires involvement by many people and actions of varied kinds.