"Nancy Young" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...
Quoted message said:
"-L." <[email hidden]> wrote
Quoted message said:I don't use IE, and never would, but in another group most of the Moms
said the child's reaction wasn't really indicative of a true abduction
- not enough panic and the reactions isn't what one would expect from a
child truly being abducted.
I was wondering if knowing what it was about skewed my
perception, I thought the same thing. Even going in I thought,
people are probably picking up on something subtle that made
them think it wasn't what it appeared to be.
I don't think it was particularly subtle; it's more what other people have
said, that's it's difficult to tell on a quick walk-past whether it's a
genuine case of a child in danger or just a family spat.
What I *did* pick up on was that it's not so much what the child says, as
how s/he says it. "You're not my dad!" is aimed at the individual, meaning
"you're only my mum's boyfriend, you can't boss me about", etc. "I don't
know this man, help me, call the police!" is aimed directly at the
passers-by, with eye-contact *at the individual people going past*, not
directed at the person holding on to you. Mention "dad", and they shut down;
focus on the abductor, and they think "brat", and shut down.
Quoted message said:
Having said that, the woman they talked to said she thought
someone else would step in. Why she thought that, I don't
know, I was having trouble seeing the clip, too.
As the chap in the discussion afterwards said, it's "bystander effect".
Everyone assumes that *someone else* will do something about it. In the
Kitty Genovese case, which is where the term comes from, the residents of a
whole block of flats watched a rape-murder from their windows, and no-one
called the police because they all thought someone else would do so. None of
them could really explain why their call would somehow invalidate other
calls, or why more than one person somehow isn't "allowed" to dial 999 about
the same incident.
Jani
