Decoding Bystander Behaviour: Actions To Address Violence Against Women

"Dominant social scripts that determine regressive gender norms and stereotypes were identified as playing a pivotal role in normalising violence."

Promoting positive bystander action to address violence against women (VAW) has been a consistent focus area for Breakthrough, an Indian women's rights organisation whose mission is to build a world where VAW is unacceptable by transforming gender norms. (Read more about some past Breakthrough campaigns at Related Summaries, below.) Breakthrough realised that, to be able to achieve this goal, they needed to better understand the factors that motivate bystanders to intervene or that prevent them from doing so. This report presents research undertaken by Breakthrough regarding bystander interventions during incidents of VAW.

Breakthrough points to the longstanding recognition that the person on whom violence is being inflicted is rarely in a position to stop it, in part due to power differentials. Thus, bystander intervention is a critical tool for preventing VAW in both public and private spaces. A bystander refers to an individual around a woman when an act of violence is committed who has the potential or capability to act. Intervention represents any positive non-violent action taken by a bystander to immediately stop an act of VAW. It is often observed that even in the event of the survivor of violence calling attention to the incident as it occurs, bystanders often fail to intervene. What accounts for this passivity, this reluctance? On the occasions when bystanders engage in an active manner, what accounts for that engagement? These are among the key questions that animate the research.

Consistent engagement with the theme of VAW within the women's movement has produced a rich repository of academic literature, which the report briefly outlines. Scholars across disciplines have examined VAW from various vantage points, focusing on how institutions of the family, community, and nation/state have determined gendering in India. For example: "the burden of proof, element of consent and the possibility of sexual pasts of the survivor [of VAW] are often used to establish her 'loose' character hence an undeserving woman. An undeclared yet powerful idea of 'Indian value' underscores the fabric of law and its implementation. Local bodies such as khap panchayats also ensure the implementation of unwritten socially sanctioned norms often resorting to violence and murder to ensure strict compliance of these moral and cultural codes."

The research entailed in-depth qualitative interviews and a digital survey. There were two distinct phases: July-August 2020 and September-October 2020. During the first phase, Breakthrough programme teams interviewed 36 participants in 3 rural areas, as well as residents of an informal working-class Delhi neighbourhood and female college students from Delhi and peri-urban/rural Haryana. The intended audience of Breakthrough's work on bystander intervention is people in the age group of 19-25 years, but due to the importance attributed to age in Indian societies and its potential as an advantage while intervening in cases of VAW, Breakthrough also included older male and female participants. The interviews were conducted either through internet-based video-calling platforms or through individual and conference phone calls due to the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant restrictions on in-person meetups. In the second phase, Breakthrough interviewed 55 participants based in 4 Indian cities and conducted an online survey among 721 people to collect quantitative data.

Among the 91 interviewees, 63 reported having intervened to prevent or stop the violence they witnessed, while 45 of those who experienced VAW reported raising their voice during the incident. A further 36 participants reported they had approached authorities, including police, to complain about the incident. Among women participants, 15 reported they had received assistance from bystanders.

The survey revealed that:

• 78.4% respondents who identified as female or other said they have experienced violence in public spaces (does not include public transport); 68.0% respondents who identified as female or other said they have experienced violence while taking public transport.
• 70.0% of respondents said they would ideally like to help in scenarios of gender-based violence by intervening/speaking out (individually or in a group).
• 54.6% of respondents said they had intervened in an incident of VAW in a public space; 67.7% respondents said their intervention resulted in the violence stopping.
• 38.5% respondents said they did not intervene because they did not know what to do; 31% of them said they were worried about their own safety; and 11.5% of them felt they would be dragged into police/legal matters.

The research found that people who intervened did so for reasons including:

• They had the urge to do the "right" thing, attesting to the presence of a strong moral component in speaking up.
• Those who were victims of child sexual abuse and domestic violence referred to unresolved rage at their own helplessness at the time of the incidents; this pent-up anger was triggered whenever they encountered abuse or sexual violence, including when they witnessed others enduring it.
• Some (both male and female) talked about their own journey towards better gender sensitisation. Often it took them years to recognise certain kinds of violence and how it was symptomatic of skewed gender dynamics and patriarchal power.
• Some attributed their action to their association with gender rights organisations, either as volunteers or full-time employees, or through general exposure to such spaces and issues.

Intervention strategies and methods were influenced by multiple factors, such as gender, age, socio-economic standing, and gender rights awareness. Participants who had experience of intervention described various methods of helping survivors, such as:

• Employing patriarchal scripts like "Don't you have a mother, sister at home?";
• Swapping seats with survivors/victims (quietly dealing with a situation of gender violence, which was seen as particularly important from the perspective of the survivor);
• Physically escorting a woman home when she is being harassed.
• Giving one's mobile number to connect later (particularly involving cases of intimate partner violence, wherein the woman might need time to reflect on her next step); and
• Taking the survivor for medical help;

A long-term intervention strategy shared by 30-year-old teacher Shakeel in Delhi involved community mobilisation. On being told by his female students about their difficulty of getting to school owing to eve-teasing on the streets around the institution, he and some of his colleagues came together to patrol the streets around peak hours, sometimes enlisting the help of police officers. He said these strategies helped the girls get to school with a feeling of security.

The research revealed the role of social norms in enabling a survivor to speak up (or not). Passive (or absent) responses stem from a variety of factors, including but not limited to fear of being blamed or stigmatised, having one's mobility curtailed, or facing aggravated assault or aggression in the wake of confrontation. Numerous participants who had experiences of intervention expressed their exasperation at the "silence" of most victims of abuse and sexual violence. A few of the participants did acknowledge the critical role played by structural and social conditioning in influencing female behaviour and "choices". Participants pointed out how girls were taught from childhood to be submissive and not challenge their surroundings, at least not overtly. "Yet, it is important to state here in no uncertain terms that though women are products of larger processes of gendering, they are not mere hapless 'survivors' but complex beings subverting patriarchal power in innovative and covert ways."

The research unearthed differences in the way men and women responded and intervened. Most men spoken to talked about the perils of being a "stranger" when intervening on behalf of women unknown to them or questioned the intervening man's "right" to speak up for a woman who was clearly not related to him. Some men also discussed concerns over their own safety. (In fact, among men participants who intervened in VAW incidents, 20 reported they faced some repercussions as a result.) Others talked about the difficulty of dealing with survivors who weren't vocal about what was happening to them. A few highlighted how the situation turned messy when, despite their intervention, some women failed to acknowledge abuse had happened. A male bystander talked about how such an experience had prompted him to think of ways to quietly deal with a situation without bringing attention to a victim, hence the rationale for his strategy.

This example is in contrast with a similar scenario in which a female bystander intervened more overtly by directly confronting the perpetrator. Some female respondents referenced the importance of having found strong role models to look up to and who encouraged them to speak up for themselves and for others. Ananya talked about how her supportive colleague helped give her the strength to confront her harasser in the office: "She was first person I spoke to about the workplace abuse and she encouraged me to report. This was the first time when the harassment was happening there were people around me who were telling me that 'you should report and we will support you' and I think this enabling environment really helped me take that step ahead." Along these lines, Bhama highlighted the recent MeToo movement as an important empowering force in giving her the strength to speak up. Women travellers also used strategies such as demonstrating camaraderie with fellow female co-passengers by quietly asking victims to move forward or aside without bringing attention to them.

Select recommendations for promoting bystander intervention going forward include:

• Shift from the protection approach to investing in agency of women and girls. (Breakthrough stresses the need for "a decisive shift in approaches towards the question of women's safety from the present infantilising mode wherein women are projected as objects in need of saving to one that recognises women's agency and their right to have absolute access to all spaces.") The government could launch initiatives to promote individual action and behaviour, amongst both men and women, against VAW.
• Build accessible reporting systems (e.g., set up reporting tools on public transportion) to foster wide dissemination of information about incidents, thereby ensuring safety of the survivor and the bystander and enabling a conducive environment for preventing violence in public spaces.
• Provide gender sensitisation for police personnel and citizen-police interfaces for more robust community action.
• Create and implement gender-sensitive curricula at the school level, and convey the need for gender-equal practices among parents.
• Stimulate systemic- and policy-level shifts for prevention of VAW and violence against girls.

Concluding words: "...often people when they witness violence, they immediately recognise it to be wrong yet do not have the vocabulary to identify it as violence against women and to articulate that women have the right to live without violence. Thus efforts to reduce VAW through encouraging bystanders to intervene must also necessarily equip bystanders with the specific language to identify what they are acting against."

Since the publication of this report, Breakthrough has partnered with a corporate entity to create a fellowship programme to train 168,000 youth as "upstanders" (people who speak/act in support of an individual who is being attacked or bullied). These fellows will be trained in the 5D's - Direct, Distract, Delegate, Document, and Delay - to teach response techniques in the event of witnessing sexual harassment in a public place.

Click here for an 11-page summary in English in PDF format.
Click here for an 11-page summary in Hindi in PDF format.
Click here for the 93-page report in Hindi in PDF format.