When People See Violence + Do Nothing

that time on the Translink bus a bloke kicked me in the head + everyone watched

You shouldn’t have said anything to him. You should have just moved away. Next time don’t say anything, just move away. Says a woman, a little older than me, who sat at the front of that stationary bus and, like the rest of the passengers, did nothing but watch while a deranged man shrieked profanities and physical threats at me before finally kicking me in the face with his heavy workbook. The lady’s visage was a curious combination of blame, outrage and horror, it is one of the few things about this traumatic incident emblazoned in my mind. You did this to yourself, her expression told me.

“Are you okay, ma’am,” the bus driver asked right away.

“No,” I replied, stunned at my admission. I began sobbing as the realisation hit the air: I was not okay and this seemed incredulous, outrageous, and most of all, highly inconvenient. 

My attacker’s heavy work boot had left a partial imprint on my face, the force of the blow bent my glasses and knocked them from my face. The driver acted immediately, and also alone. He must have flown down the aisle, I saw him, out of the corner of my eye, grab my attacker by the collar and physically throw him out the back door. I saw the driver’s glasses on the sidewalk. 

A small horde of onlookers gathered around me for a schadenfreude session. Everyone loves a damsel in distress they can swoop in and rescue, as long as rescue only means offering empty words of comfort after the actual distressing stuff has occurred. I received strokes on the head, pats on the back, and empty words of comfort. I received well-meaning instructions on how I should feel and what I should and shouldn’t do from a group of people who watched a man wearing heavy work boots kick me with full force in the head, after a yelling a string of profanities, a death wish or two and some other vile nonsense at me. Yes everyone who watches a man kick me in the head after threatening to kill me wants to comfort me, weird how that works.

The schadenfreude worshippers glorified my pain by chanting how strong I was and made me the mother of all humanity by assigning me a duty to press charges. Looking back, it feels like these people were worshipping the occurrence of violence against a woman, my assault was an event they could look to as a confirmation of a certain narrative. These were people seeking to comfort themselves more than me, and seeking come to terms with the inertia of own reactions, whether or not they realised it. Fear prevents people from getting involved, ego means these same fearful people who did nothing to help you will make themselves readily available to you after the fact, with answers they believe you require. They gush how strong you are and in the same breath, condemn you because you stood up for yourself in one moment that transformed fear into angry confidence. All because you’re a woman. Do we want to empower women, or do we only want to keep them in gilded cages? There’s a difference. 

I will set that gilded cage, which society tries to shove me in, on fire.

When the constable asked do you want to press charges, I immediately said no, thinking it would be a lengthy, bloated process that sought to answer the question what did you do to provoke him? In the immediacy of the concussion fog I could not process what pressing charges would entail, I didn’t even know what bus I was on or how I got there, the force of the blow to my head had caused me to lose all the time that had elapsed since nearly 30 minutes earlier, when I left my flat. I just wanted it all to go away, and momentarily thought ignoring the assault would erase it. Still, I had clarity of thought to feel a certain culpability at having stood up to a male bully. 

My presence made a man uncomfortable. I did not take up less space, as he seemed to want—I didn’t move away. I disobeyed, I have no regrets and I would do it again, with the same bold fury. Did I unnecessarily provoke him by refusing to shrink away? Is the cure for bullying to let bullies have their way? Why is a female responsible for violence done to her? Why does she have to pay ransom with her body? Is it because homo sapiens are primal beings and the survival of the human species rests with the female body? Humanity both reviles and worships the female vessel. Like any vessel, our worth derives from our capacity to contain every desire/fear/pleasure humans wish us to carry and decant at will. A female human only has to exist to be violent or provocative. It’s as though we’re all still paying for Eve’s ‘mistake’. Christians tell us the Virgin Mary paid Eve’s debt, and yet here we still are, making payments on a mysteriously expanding principal that we will never fully pay off. Living in a female body, even this 55 year old menopausal body, is an act of resistance. 

Six or seven years have passed since I wrote that. Since then, Covid-19 destroyed all social connections, forcing unhealthy and tense domestic isolation onto many family units. Community building has not recovered the broken social connections. Many people lived through domestic bullying and tension, faced the near breakdown of their relationship, in the same year that their elderly parent died and they cut ties with their narcissistic friends and their world shrunk to nothing—it felt like sheer hell to live through that year. I faced existential struggles that continuously violated my limits, I burned out on multiple levels, superimposed burnout atop burnout. I began to believe everyone around me telling me I was too dramatic, had negative energy, blah blah. Maybe I did overreact. Then I read about Social Pain Overlap Theory, and I read about social exclusion. Imagine my shock and relief to discover that the brain treats social pain the same way it treats physical pain.

Having the clarity of time and the wisdom of age, I add to my understanding of what happened by seeing them through the lens of social pain and exclusion. The pain of knowing people watched me get threatened and kicked in the head and did nothing felt worst to me than the pain of some creepy unstable guy attacking me. I could forgive an unstable bloke, he clearly had something on board or he had a mental breakdown.

How could I forgive a bus full of seemingly functional people? That felt more difficult.

Epilogue. The low life who assaulted me, James Kowbell, did not have the courage to show up in court to face me and the judge. I did. I did have the courage. It was a terrible personal hell time, in which I privately struggled with grief from a miscarriage, the death of a sibling I didn’t know was dying, the suicide of my co-parent, the death of my father—I felt like Job, spiritually, like I lived in the hell of grief and suffering. No one could accompany me to court, I went to court alone. I was terrified and I cried in the Crown Attorney’s office, I can’t remember his name, he was sympathetic All that effort for nothing. Witnesses showed up. Even the bus driver, Raphael, showed up. The violent perpetrator didn’t show up.

Fcuk you, Canada—you reward violent men and punish their female victims. You also took away our most powerful coping mechanism, our connection to each other. Social distancing, you made a biological imperative, social connection, into a life threat—fcuk you, Wokeist Canada. There’s a lot to atone for right now, lots of open festering wounds that Wokeism caused, begging for care.

How do we move forward?