It must be her fault
How do they know he identifies as a man?
A group of customers at a cafe in the Aegean district of Soma rescued a woman from a male attacker identified only as T.Ç. who broke a glass on her head and battered her, local agencies reported on June 29.
Video footage showed T.Ç. sitting across from his wife at a cafe before getting up, walking over to her side of the table with a glass and breaking it on her head, and attacking her with a knife he picked up off the table.
The security footage shows customers run to the woman’s rescue and batter the man in an attempt to fend him off of the woman.
It shows a woman getting there first, and being thrown to the floor by the man.
T.Ç. is seen escaping the people around in the security footage as male customers are seen watching the perpetrator batter the customers who tried to stop him.
One male customer is seen picking up his coffee cup instead of stopping T.Ç.
Stopping violent men is women’s job.
Reading about it is bad enough. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video, it wouldn’t be good for my heart because I would want to intervene so hard. I don’t want to believe that there are men out there who think that such things are none of their business and someone else will deal with it, even though I know it’s true. I raised my sons to be defenders, not onlookers. I’m afraid I have a history of intervening, too. For some reason people seem to listen to a bossy woman in a wheelchair. (Perhaps it’s the novelty. We’re supposed to be invisible and inaudible.)
tigger, that’s my feeling, too. I rarely watch the videos Ophelia puts up, except things like dogs and so forth, because I can’t cope. For me, it’s my anxiety, not my heart, but same thing.
I was on a train to California one day when a drunk started harassing a couple of young people with kids. The topic was football, and he was a Nebraska Huskers fan. He tried everything to get the young man to challenge him, but they were just sitting there as uncomfortable as they could be, their two girls hearing the obscenity this man spewed. Finally I just looked over at him and said, loud enough to be sure he would hear, “There are children here, and they should not be subjected to this.” He looked really surprised. He said “meow” to me, but stfu. The conductor removed him and took him somewhere to sober up. When he came back later, he apologized, not only to the family, but to me. All the men in the area were pointedly looking the other way as he increased his crap; none of them would step forward. I have to say, I was nervous. I know how Nebraska fans can be…they could give ‘ooligans a run for their money. It is a long trip from Nebraska to California by train; I was glad he got off in Colorado, before he got drunk again.
As someone else who can’t help but intervene, I have a couple of observations:
One of the reasons men sometimes don’t intervene is that the situation is much more likely to escalate if they do. Where there’s already violence, such as in this case, this hardly seems like much of an excuse and without excusing the men who did nothing, it can be a difficult sort of calculation to do, especially when things are happening quickly. Not that I’m suggesting people sit around and calculate when and how to intervene or whether doing so will make things better or worse, just that shock and competing pressure leads to indecision. Delay leads to indecision, too; if you don’t intervene immediately, it becomes harder to do so as tension escalates. Again, I don’t think people generally make conscious calculations in these situations, just that people respond to competing pressures in different ways. They want to protect people… but they also don’t want to get hurt or make things worse or, perhaps shamefully, lose any battle for dominance that might kick off.
I’ve been in situations like iknklast’s many times and my instinct has always been to intervene fairly quickly. But I have a lot of training and experience in self defence and I’ve been trained in negotiation and de-escalation, so the risk that I’d make things worse has been relatively low. I’d probably intervene regardless, but I don’t think that makes me especially virtuous. It’s more that my sense of injustice and wanting to protect people overrides my sense of judgement and self-preservation. I’ve probably made things worse on occasion.
I’ve been in situations involving violence – often sudden violence like the situation Ophelia describes – quite a few times, too. In most of those cases, I’ve been there in an official capacity (bouncer, barman, otherwise in charge) and/or I’ve been expecting trouble so ready to act when it occurred. On the few occasions when I’ve been involved in sudden. unexpected violence, I definitely found that shock slowed my ability to take action.
tigger: I’ve noticed that being in a wheelchair usually makes me invisible… until I make a fuss about something. Then it just makes everyone uncomfortable (that discomfort is presumably why I’m invisible in the first place) and they generally over-compensate.
Men don’t have THAT much advantage when dealing with deranged, violent, men. In San Francisco a couple of years ago, a man walking with his partner asked a street troll to stop shouting obscenities at her…he received NINE stab wounds.
There’s an extra social gap that makes groups fail to respond collectively.