I think it’s time we took a stand on bystanders.
“Standing by” in a movie about soldiers or spacemen means waiting for instructions to take action. A bystander does not stand by in this way.
To “stand by” can also mean to be on someone’s side, or to have their back, as in the classic teen romance film, Stand By Me. This, too, does not describe a bystander.
A bystander is something entirely different. The word is frequently encountered in media reports — almost always accompanied by the adjective “innocent” — about casualties in combat. “Police opened fire on a criminal gang, killing eight innocent bystanders”; or “the bomb exploded and five innocent bystanders were injured”.
The Online Etymology Dictionary, which becomes droller by the day, says that bystanders “have been ‘innocent’ at least since 1829”. The word entered modern English in the early 1600s, meaning a spectator, or “one who stands near”. In older versions it was “stander-by” and previously “sitter-aboute” which makes one think, perhaps unfairly, of people who couldn’t be bothered to get up and move during explosions or shoot-outs.
As an aside, how do we know how innocent these bystanders (or bysitters) in tragic circumstances really were? One might have been cheating on his wife; another may have defrauded his employer. Of course they did not deserve to be killed or injured, but still, innocence is a relative concept.
The word “onlooker” is perhaps more apt for the kind of bystander who stands (or sits) and does nothing while something violent or evil happens in front of them. Perhaps “bystander” was chosen because it implies closeness to the action, whereas an onlooker could have been looking down on the incident from a window 30 floors above.
Incidentally, the word “witness” contains fewer negative connotations than “bystander” or “onlooker”. A witness is someone prepared to come forward and state their first-person view of events to bring the guilty to justice and exonerate the innocent (including the innocent bystanders).
Bystanders are not always innocent, however, and I don’t mean the cheaty-fraudy types. I mean those who could have and should have stepped in, with or without necessary risk to themselves, to stop whatever dreadful deed was being carried out under their very noses.
Innocence aside, “bystander” can also be used in a far more sinister way. In psychology, the “bystander effect” is an actual diagnosable condition, more likely to apply when there are several bystanders (or onlookers) as opposed to just one person who might, in their solitude and with only their own conscience to answer to, be prompted to be the Good Samaritan.
In 1970, researchers John Darley and Bibb Latané conducted a wide-ranging laboratory experiment on why an individual in a crowd is less likely to help someone else. The website simplypsychology.org summarises their findings thus:
“The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that an individual’s likelihood of helping decreases when passive bystanders are present in an emergency situation. The most frequently cited real-life example of the bystander effect regards a young woman called Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in Queens, New York, in 1964, while several neighbours looked on. No-one intervened until it was too late.”
Bystanders, according to Latané and Darley, 'are less likely to intervene in emergency situations as the size of the group increases, as they feel less personal responsibility'
Bystanders, according to Latané and Darley, “are less likely to intervene in emergency situations as the size of the group increases, as they feel less personal responsibility”.
Where does this leave the teenagers who witnessed a grade 10 boy assaulting a grade 10 girl at Nic Diederichs High School in Krugersdorp this week?
The video is everywhere. There was a verbal confrontation between a sitting-down girl and a standing-up boy. She stood up, more insults were traded, then the boy punched her in the face. The girl attempted to fight back but the boy continued to pummel her.
This is not purely about gender-based violence; and the substance of their argument is irrelevant. What is relevant is the video, which shows about a dozen teens closing in on the incident, not to intervene or help, but to film it on their cellphones.
It is tempting to say that filming a violent act, to provide concrete evidence of who punched whom, is now seen as more important than standing between the combatants — neither of whom was armed with weapons — to try to stop the assault.
History tells us otherwise. In an article for Psychology Today, published in 2009, Melissa Burkley and Jessica Schrader reflect on a notorious incident that occurred in 1983, well before cellphones were invented. Made famous in the 1988 film The Accused, the case of a 15-year-old girl assaulted and raped in front of 20 “witnesses” who did nothing resulted in the subsequent prosecution of these “bystanders” or “onlookers” as complicit in the crime.
Maybe we need more of this sort of thing.
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