In 2015, a young woman was gang-raped on Panama City Beach, Florida. The Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen later said that, within feet of the attack, there were ‘hundreds, hundreds of people standing there — watching, looking, seeing, hearing what’s going on’. Yet nobody did anything to intervene or try to help the victim. This is an example of what is known as ‘the bystander effect’ or ‘bystander apathy’, when an individual witnesses a situation in which someone is in need of help and does not offer it. Conversely, ‘bystander intervention’ is when a person witnesses a situation in which someone is in apparent need of help and offers it in some form.
I recently worked with colleagues from Middlesex University on a project funded by the British Transport Police and Department for Transport. We were considering how to reduce sexual harassment and offending on public transport internationally (Gekoski et al. 2015). Sexual harassment and offending can range from unwanted sexually explicit comments to rape.
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
