Hoping for the Best Doesn't Cut It Anymore
Hoping for the Best Doesn't Cut It Anymore
by Nancy Martin
A few weeks ago, I pulled into a parking space at my local supermarket. When I unsnapped my seatbelt and got out of my truck, I immediately noticed the car in the adjacent spot was empty, engine running. Well, the front seat was empty, but the back seat had one passenger—a sleeping infant in a car seat. The child had been left alone in the car.
What did I do? I could have called the police. I could have ignored the situation and gone into the store. I could have started shouting. But what I did was wait in my car (about four minutes) until the driver returned—a harried young man carrying a prescription from the pharmacy. He got into the car and drove away.
Did I confront him? No. Should I have intervened? Probably so. But I didn't. Why not? Because I'm not that kind of person. I'm mostly polite. I mind my own business. I'm not confrontational. Yeah, maybe I was intimidated, too. Maybe I didn't want to face hostility. I was chicken.
My bad.
If we have learned anything from the horrific stories that came to light at Penn State last week, it should be that we all have a moral obligation to intervene when we see something bad happening. Lemme tell you: This goes against my upbringing. And I've got to get over this.
I talked about the Penn State situation with a woman (my husband's aunt, technically, who's younger than he is) who's the former dean of women at a small college and now the person charged with overseeing whether or not her college complies with various regulations concerning the health and safety of students. I'm going to call her DeeDee, although that's not her name. I thought DeeDee was the ideal person to shed some light on the events at Penn State, and boy, did she give me an earful.
Did you know that one in four women is sexually assaulted in college? This stat blew me away.
Perhaps worse? Only 10% of women under the age of 18 report sexual asault. That astonished me.
And 90% of rapes are committed by rapists who have either done it before or will do it again. (Rarely is a rape committed by a guy who once just got a little drunk and carried away.)
I remember knowing a woman who was raped when I was in college. (Okay, this happend 30 years ago--a different era, so bear with me.) Within hours of her assault, all the female students on campus knew what had happened to her, but we kept quiet for the sake of her privacy and dignity. She left college, never to return. The guy stayed, graduated, went on to do……well, I'm trying not to imagine what he did, but considering DeeDee's statistics, I can assume. The college hushed up the incident, because what college wants the world to know such things can happen on campus? (I bet you all have similar stories.) Fortunately, that particular angle of the story has been fixed. Colleges are now required to report incidents that jeopardize student safety. Colleges are also required to create mandatory education for employees and students, too, to tell them what their moral obligations are.
Most workplaces annually require all employees to take an online test on the subject of sexual harassment. But rumor has it that the people whose names appear high on the executive flow charts (at, say, big associations of, say, restaurant owners) are more likely to skip the test or "have their secretaries take it for them" than others. Which means, big surprise, they're more likely to ignore the lessons.
We live in an era when we feel obligated to take the car keys away from someone who's had too much to drink, but apparently when it comes to sex and violence we're still a little squeamish about intervening. I know I am.
Have you ever intervened? Or do you walk away and hope for the best?
Obviously, we have to stop minding our own business when somebody is in trouble. I need to get over my polite lady thing.
We'd like to think we'd intervene if we saw a grown man raping an eight-year-old. But if that man is someone we've known and respected all our lives, someone who can control our employment and/or has the respect of even more powerful people in our world…….well, I guess some of us would slip away without saying a word. Or we'd wait until the next day to speak up—but not calling the police, just alerting a "higher authority" and hoping for the best.
This has got to stop. We're all going to have to get bolder.
DeeDee gave me three "D" options:
Make Direct contact. In other words, if you see something bad happening, you confront the bad guy yourself. A lot of us don't feel capable of being direct, or we fear repercussions, though, so the next option is:
Delegate. Call a cop. Dial 911 or summon mall security or go around the corner and call your resident assistant—anyone who will step in. (I guess the important thing to remember here is to make sure the person who contact actually follows up!)
Distract. If you see a young woman, say, being accosted by a drunk in a bar, spill your drink on him.
Now, I gotta say, this distraction thing sounds right up my alley. Sure, it might not deter the evil doer for long, but hey, it would give me a minute to screw up my courage to go a step farther. Or it would give the police time to arrive.
So I figure distractions are what TLC could excell at.
"Excuse me, sir, I see you're attacking that young lady, but could you tell me how to get to the post office?
I need some other ideas. Suggestions, anyone?
Because turning a blind eye and hoping for the best just isn't an option anymore.
