Thank you everyone for such a great conversation yesterday! We touched on so many different topics, all of which led to an incredibly stimulating conversation. One question that struck me was the question of moral responsibility. In class, Elizabeth mentioned the moral responsibility a neighbor might have to a DV victim. While I was drafting this blog, I kept coming back to the issue of responsibility we have toward each other. Yesterday morning I ended up in a discussion with my mentor, Jan, about moral responsibility and how individuals react to certain situations. We argued about how different circumstances cause different reactions, and while people are more than willing to help, certain situations will cause them to freeze and hesitate.
A few years ago, a woman was sexually assaulted in a train station while two different conductors looked on. While the conductors did call for help, they did nothing to physically stop the man. By the time the cops reached her, the woman had been raped twice and the man was long gone. The victim filed a lawsuit against the conductors and recently, a judge ruled that the conductors were in no way responsible to step in and help the woman, as long as they called for help. MTA stated that the conductors should not be expected to take the place of law enforcement. (http://www.nypost.com/seven/04012009/news/regionalnews/subway_rapist_victims_shock_162317.htm)
Another one of my CEO co-workers showed me a video of a woman who was beat up on the train by a random stranger in Spain, while other passengers looked on and did nothing. Incidents like these happen everywhere and it is always the onlooker’s moral responsibility that is questioned. My mentor’s statement that everyone claims they will help someone but very few are willing to act in the moment has truth to it. A lot of people might not get involved simply because it wasn’t their business. I myself might think twice about helping the woman on the train, for the fear of him turning on me would stop me. Should it be each person’s moral responsibility to look out for the safety of others? If so, is it possible to create a moral code of conduct? Is it possible to enforce such a code?
13 comments:
Thanks, Ridhi, for choosing and leading the discussion on this interesting topic. I've found myself talking about this with colleagues and friends in recent days -- all ideas sparked by your piece. (Justice Studies thesis topic??)
Has anyone out there read the novel THE KITE RUNNER (recently made into a film)? It explores the psychological toll being a bystander takes on an individual. While it is a story of one person and he witnesses an awful crime against a friend/relative -- so not the situations of stranger/bystander that Ridhi writes about -- it takes place in Afghanistan and there is clearly an allegory about the price paid when people stand by and watch their own country's assaulted by violence from within and without. So that's the question I'll piggy-back on Ridhi's excellent one about individuals getting involved: are there larger socio-political implications when individuals (in seemingly small, domestic/local situations) don't get involved to help?
Ridhi,
Again thank you for bringing up my favorite topics to talk about.
Elizabeth made a great point that in situtations of DV, the neighbor has a moral obligation to step in, same in cases of sexual assault and even in human rights abuses. However, the problem arises when domestic violence and sexual assault are considered private matters where people are afraid to intervene; in addition, our society has a lack of empathy and more apathy for victims; we have heard numerous cases where society will place the blame on the victim. I would actually even make the statement that majority of our society does not even know what sexual assault is. In cases of domestic violence and sexual assault, society re-tramatizes the individual.
The good news is in the case of domestic violence and sexual assault, there has been a push on education, prevention, and intervention. Just to keep everyone in the loop, we are advocating to have a prevention-based CUNY wide Sexual Assault Policy.
On the international human rights scale, these crimes are political and in order for real intervention to occur, state institutions will have to meddle into the affairs of other states,and so far there is no legitimate international body that has taken a bipartisan approach and been successful in intervening and stopping a genocide.
Most importantly, we need to go back and construct a realistic moral responsibility; society and individuals intervene in different ways and at different levels; some may intervene before the violence occurs, some during, and then we need folks to intervene afterwards. Therefore, I would propose that we should have a seminar in ways states and individuals can intervene;
Two weekends ago, a friend and I, along with my mother took our children to Prospect Park because the circus was in town. Unfortunately for us the tickets were sold out, so we reluctantly spent the day by the pond; the one in which the water looked green, muddy, and had a smelly odor. While at the pond and watching my daughter like a hawk, I realized, along with others, that there was a little girl, about 2 1/2 yrs, who was on the other side (about 50ft) of the pond throwing rocks. Immediately we started scouting for the parents, who were not insight, and about less than a minute later the child fell into the water. Immediately, I started running and jumped in the water to get her. By the time I had reached her, she had gone about 2ft away from the edge of the pond and was struggling to stay afloat while ingesting some water. In the end, the child was returned to the mother who was sitting with a little boy (about 5 yrs) at a distance of about 40ft away from the pond.
People had very harsh words for the mother as you could imagine. Some even called ACS. Others, including the mother thanked me. I managed to put a word in advising her to take the child to the hospital.
In this moment of chaos, someone pointed out that my phone, which was in my back pocket this whole time was now wet. My car key was also missing. I started walking back to the pond to check to see if the key had fallen in the water and realized that my mother had not moved from her position throughout this whole ordeal. Later I asked her why she had not reacted when the child fell in the water and she said she saw that I was already in action and further more, she could not bear the sight of a drown child.
The next morning after waking up, I could barely open my eyes. They were red, a bit swollen and irritated. After going to the doctor, I learned I had an infection for which I am still using eye drops. I believe this was as a result of the dirty water going in my eyes. I am also still waiting for a new phone from Verizon. I also had to throw away my sneakers.
Fortunately and unfortunately, this was my second time performing such act (the first was at a pool where my daughter took swimming lessons), and both times there were bystanders like my mother who did nothing.
This last incident, however, gave me an insight into why some bystanders do nothing. My mother assumed that because I was already in action, there was nothing for her to do, which could have been a grave mistake. She also had fear of seeing a drown child. Fear is real and to an extent it is legitimate. Fortunately for me, the lost and inconveniences that I endured as a result of my action was quite minimal. However, I have heard of people who have lost their lives while trying to save someone.
For me, I would have to judge a bystander on a case by case basis while taking the risk involved into consideration. This issue of moral responsibility is one of complexity, which makes it harder to judge.
Oh Kerry-Ann!! That was a very vivid description! I think you are correct: as Ridhi’s anecdote suggests, it’s not such a simple thing to know what the “right” thing is in any particular situation (sometimes there ARE “areas of moral clarity” but not always) when what hangs in the balance is your own survival and protection weighed against the moral & altruistic imperative to save another (has anyone ever read Octavia Butler’s book Kindred?? It’s awesome and there’s a story of a woman saving a child from drowning in that story, with interesting implications). When we hear news reports about folks taking extraordinary steps to help another they are often depicted as “heroes,” which then suggests the flip-side: those who don’t help are…..what? And we fall so easily to collapsing the complexity into something simplistic such as a hero/villain dichotomy when the story is probably more complicated than that.
I appreciate Darakshan’s reminder that for some issues, it would be very helpful to take steps towards prevention—prevention as a form of intervention, as a form of action, as a moral imperative?—to preclude some of those incidents from occurring in the first place. Is it a form of bystander mentality if we do not advocate for prevention? Does a state fail when it does not take steps to prevent what is preventable? Does the global “community” fail when it does not take steps to prevent the preventable?
Two topics come to mind when I think about the ideas of collaboration, accountability, and the role of bystander mentality. In class last week, we spoke briefly about the genocide in Rwanda. When we think about how other countries (such as the U.S.) failed to intervene (see Samantha Powers, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide), I realized that we tend to forget about the outside factors that play a role in the action on the ground (the genocide). For example, in Rwanda, Mitterand’s son was a key arms dealer whose weapons were brought into the country and used in the genocide. Where are our interventions around that? Are we succumbing to another form of bystander mentality (we as individuals, we in terms of “our” country) if we don’t contest the manufacture and distribution of weapons? Do we ever even think about that sort of thing or do we just “wait” for the “event” to occur and then fret over how to “intervene”?? The following is from the introduction to the “Anthropology of War” book I sent you this past week:
….Farmer suggests that we trace “the social life of dangerous things” to reveal the nested hierarchy of progressively more essential (and thus responsible) cogs in the wheel. Farmer starts with the ethnographically visible, in this case, a little boy who landed on Farmer’s surgery table in Rwanda after handling a war weapon that had been placed 12 years earlier during the genocide of 1994. Farmer “pick[ed] out pieces of plastic” from the child’s torn body and then sought to identify the fragments. It was a land mine, as Farmer suspected, “manufactured I’m quite sure, not in Rwanda [but] in Europe, the United States, or perhaps Russia,” a war weapon that by “sinister design” looks like an innocent plaything….
The second topic that comes to my mind is related to an aspect of my father’s story (my ambition is to write my father’s story and tie it to aspects of 20th century history and questions that still plague us). There was a massacre in my father’s hometown, a village in northeastern Poland where the Polish Christians and Polish Jews lived side by side for centuries--the relationship between the Christians and the Jews was often tense; sometimes they seemed to just tolerate each other. The story of the massacre was revealed to the world in 2001 by an historian (the book is called “Neighbors…”). I grew up with the story, having heard it all my life from my father. In July 1941, after the Nazis came into town and took over, there was a massacre where “half the town” slaughtered the other half: a Polish-Christian mob killed about 1600 Jews. There were a handful of Jewish survivors, including the man who provided testimony of the event after the war—my father’s cousin (who was saved by a Christian woman who hid him in her barn). There’s more to the story, but for now I’ll just ask: were all the Polish Christians from Jedwabne morally responsible for the massacre or just those who participated in the killing? Why didn’t more Christian neighbors intervene? Why was the Christian woman who saved my father’s cousin ostracized from her community after the book came out in 2001? There are many more questions that surround this story, but I guess I should stop here for the purposes of the blog….
Ridhi,
Thank you for choosing such a great topic!! I was also listening in on the debate with our mentor Jan on moral responsibility. I think he makes a valid point that we cannot say we will intervene if there is a situation like the ones Ridhi described. One of the things I notice is that people will look around and be like he or she shuldve done something but what about the person pointing fingers? We always seem to look at other peoples faults but fail to look at our own. Another thing I notice is that once a person tries to interfere they also face consequences with the law, getting injured, or even risking their lives.
A personal example I would like to share is how my mother lives with my grandparents and how she continually physically and verbally abuses them. When I used to live there I wold attempt to do everything in my power to prevent this. I would beg them to kick her out but would use her drug addiction as an excuse. Finally the police were getting so fed up constantly showing up in our residence that they warned us we would all be arrested. By law if my mother was to say one of us hit her we would all have to be arrested. This is when I decided to move out. I feel that I did my part to try to prevent this. My grandparents also have a responsibility to themselves. In this situation I feel like the bystander. I always ask myself if things get out of hand would I have any fault? Should I keep intervening even when the victims turn their backs on me? And should I even risk getting arrested?
I believe that Jan our mentor does have a valid point. We need to be in the situation and see how we react. But I believe that some type of moral responsibility should exist. We should be able to know that if we are in danger there are people willing to help us.
Thanks Ridhi for bring up such an interesting topic! Everyone has brought up many personal and interesting experiences!
I myself have been interested the phenomena of the “Bystander Affect” for quite some time. While Ridhi acknowledges that one reason for this may be the fear of the perpetrator turning on the one trying to help, this does not explain why large groups of people do not intervene; in regards to Professor Reitz question, I do believe there must be a larger socio-political force driving these behaviors, but as always, there are also other factors involved.
In one of my classes we were discussing the Ted Kennedy rape trial. In an interview with a researcher studying the case, attorney Roy Black states that they has done focus groups to determine that woman on a jury are actually less likely to convict in rape trial. The researcher attributes this to an “other world hypothesis”, whereby people are reluctant to believe that something negative (in this case, rape) is: a.) happening, and b.) could happen to them. While this theory may not be very applicable to the mass violence taking place in countries like Afghanistan or Rwanda, it seems very relevant to Elizabeth’s DV scenario. I recall a situation when I was working at a gym and there was a couple who would come there; the man was always verbally or physically assaulting the woman, and not one person ever said anything even though this persisted over a long period of time. Though the abuse she experienced in the gym was relatively minor, one can only imagine what occurred behind closed doors.
To put a legal spin on things, I believe that on some level, the adversarial nature of our system works to condone (inadvertently) wretched behaviors. Fortunately on some levels and unfortunately on others, our courts are concerned about what you can prove. Often times, such as in undercover investigations, a suspect may be allowed to go on committing violent acts so investigators can “build a case”, in order to get them on as many charges as possible.
In one of my classes we are studying domestic violence affidavits. The interviewers creating these documents must twist and contort these stories in order for the complaining witness to appear as if she is “serious”; if prosecutor believe that she may go back to her abuser, she will have no chance of receiving legal protection.
So many personal experiences, I’ll throw mine into the mix! The other night I was out with some of my friends attending a fundraiser event. Several hours into the event, my friend and I noticed a girl and guy on the couch right next to us. The guy was clearly intoxicated, on top of the girl, shoving and biting her. The girl was quietly asking him to stop, but he just kept going. My friend and I approached her, holding out our hands to help her get away from him. She didn’t accept our offer. Things progressively got worse, and very scary, and we called a security guard to come over. Before doing anything, he asked the girl several times if she wanted the guy to get off of her. For a while she said nothing, and so the security guard stood there with us. A minute or two later, the girl looked at us and said “yes, I want him to get off of me,” and the security guard pulled him off and kicked him out of the lounge. We asked the girl if she was okay, and sat with her for a while. After processing this whole event, I started asking myself a lot of questions: how well did they know each other? Why wasn’t she pushing the guy, trying harder to get him off of her? Why didn’t the security guard pull him off her without asking her if that’s what she wanted? Why didn’t she immediately accept his help? (Here I go, blaming the victim) Would I have gotten involved if my friend wasn’t there with me- even if the risk that Kerry-Ann and Prof. Waterston talk about was minimal for me?
Darakshan, I agree that a majority of society does not know what sexual assault is, or how to recognize it. I think so many things (stopping, preventing, etc) can come from being educated about sexual violence (or violence in general).
Elizabeth, in many ways I can relate to your personal experiences. We talk about moral responsibility, guilt, and intervening, but at some point you HAVE to remove yourself from the situation, especially when you start to become a victim. Like you said, people have a responsibility to themselves, and we cannot forget that while we are considering our responsibility to others.
I think it is really interesting that we’ve brought morality into the discussion. I believe that involuntarily, we are actually following a code of conduct. We all make choices based on morality. The problem with this code on conduct is that it is constantly changing. It seems that what was morally right 30 years ago is being considered nowadays an old fashion behavior. In old days women never reported their abusive husbands because they considered it as being immoral. It took us (the Americans) years to understand that domestic violence is morally wrong and that the abused person is the real victim. In the old days, a woman was considered sometimes culpable for being abused because she was being perceived as the instigator. I don’t want to discuss the fact that this is still a common approach around the globe.
Teaching people moral responsibility is a hard task because this is an individualized choice. I have a story too. It is about one of my friends who is a police officer. One evening on the train, on his way home, he witnessed a women being abused by her partner. My friend was off duty and dressed in street clothes. He intervened, and while he tried to immobilize the man, the woman hit him over the head with a hard object (I don’t recall the name of it). He had to go to the hospital and he was home for a few weeks. In my understanding, police officers are required to take the necessary measures, even if they are off duty to insure public safety. Therefore, his intervention was more than a moral response, it was a professional one. However, he told me that after this experience he will think twice before intervening in a street encounter, if he is off duty.
My point is: if we cannot even count on the ones who are supposed to protect us, how can we expect other people to intervene? I’m sure none of us want to be the victim, but with all the moral code in place none of us wants to be a dead “hero” either. I don’t think a moral code can be enforced because, actually, we take these decisions in a split second, like Kerry-Ann’s case. Amanda and Elisabeth mentioned that people have a responsibility to themselves, and I think we are being caught up in this responsibility to see the greater picture of having responsibility towards others.
I’m also thinking about people who have been victims and hoped to have someone helping them, but nobody did. How are their moral responsibilities being shaped as a result of such an experience? Do you think they are going to help the next victim or just look the other way (thinking nobody helped me)? I personally have no answer to this question.
Great stories in this blog.
Sorry to weigh in so late. I guess I have been a bystander to this moral discussion, carefully weighing how to behave before I wade into treacherous waters (unlike Kerryann, who did the "right" thing instinctively, without parsing her options.)
I have been teaching "Ethical and Moral Dilemmas in CRJ" this semester. I want to relate an exercise we did in class that speaks to this cognitive-instinctual divide.
I showed a film in class about the awful consequences of children being separted from their incarecerated mothers, and the programs designed to remediate this problem. Following the film, all students empathized with the mothers and children and shared many thoughts about how to help them. Then we broke into groups where students were asked to consider the fairness and justness of the program to other groups: imprisoned fathers, female inmates without children, taxpayers, etc. After the groupwork, EVERY SINGLE STUDENT in class had changed his or her mind and now believed that we should do nothing to help incarcerated mothers and their children.
A moral devolution, no? Moral decision making (Which Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard-very influentially-has argued is a primarily cognitive event where the decision maker has the developed capacity to weigh social costs and benefits before deciding), seems in this case to ensure only that empathy will be thrown out of the mix.
I cannot help but notice the firestorm that Obama recently set off by saying that the next Supreme Court justice should have empathy: many are already arguing that empathy would only get in the way when it comes to interpreting the law!
I found Professor Stein's anecdote very disturbing. It's hard to assess why the students had a complete turn-around with the information provided in the story (I know we are limited by blog-space). But Prof. Stein did mention that the organizing principle of the discussion was "fairness," positioned IN COMPETITION with other groups, which itself forces the students to imagine "fairness" in the context of scarcity (since competition is tied to scarcity). With that as the frame, you could predict the group considering the problem to come to the decision that it did come to. If a system of "fairness" operates OUTSIDE of a competitive frame, what would have their conclusions been? Is it really the lack of empathy that is missing or got lost or is it that people were asked to consider what is fair under conditions of scarcity and that scarcity was not part of the discussion or the analysis. In my view, scarcity as context needs to be problematized. If scarcity were problematized, I believe the students' conclusions would have been very different.
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