If a stranger in the street looked like they needed help, would you intervene?
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Version 0 of 1. Last summer was one of the hottest on record. The streets were full of prams and teenagers, pavements sticky with melted Twisters. I have a friend who has a friend called Rose who, in August, was waiting for a bus into Camden. At the bus stop a woman sat blankly while in the pram next to her, her baby cried. It wasn’t a regular cry, she said, it was a scream, like an exhausted, in-pain scream. The woman was bent forward. People were staring as they passed. After a few minutes, Rose asked if she was OK. The mother looked up from her lap. “She never stops crying,” she said. “She hates me.” They talked for a few minutes, over the screams. The bus was late. “Maybe she’d like you to pick her up?” Rose suggested. “Sometimes they just want to be held.” The mother sighed and balanced the baby on the very edge of her knee. Except, when she took the baby out of the pram, Rose noticed bruises. On the baby’s cheek, and on her neck, and then the bus came. What would you do? This is what I keep thinking. What would I do? So much of our lives are spent trying to do the right thing. Not even the best thing, just the least bad thing. And what’s your responsibility in a situation like this, when you see somebody that you think needs help, and somebody that you think needs protecting? I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books. “You emerge into a clearing. A knight is resting on a rock. The dragon is nowhere to be seen, but a faint smell of sulphur is coming from the east. Do you call the police?” “You are standing in a candlelit room. There are two doors, and on the table is a dusty children’s book. Which door do you choose?” I used to love these books, but in real life other people’s adventures can derail your own. Rose called social services. She knew the woman’s name and the area in which she lived, and they wrote it all down. Then they said she had to call the police. She knew the police would be heavy handed – she thought the woman needed help, that this might push her over the edge, but she called. That evening the police left a message for Rose. They’d seen nothing that concerned them, they said, but thanks anyway. I imagine I would have felt half relieved then, and half worried. That they’d missed something. Not long after this Rose received another call. A friend had read a clear description of her on the message board of her local NCT group. She was wanted. A member of the group had written that Rose was stalking her sister. Sending men round to their house. How did she know where they lived? She must have followed them home, they said. The mothers’ messages grew angrier. Months passed; the conversation continued. Thirty comments in, they questioned whether they had been real police officers – perhaps they were paedophiles, tipped off by Rose. Let’s find her, they wrote. Let’s get her. Should Rose have stayed quiet at the bus stop? Should she have given up when social services were too short-staffed to take over? I think about the time my boyfriend approached a man threatening his girlfriend in the trees next to Sainsbury’s and the woman screamed at him to leave. And the night somebody was getting their face kicked in on our road and the bouncer told my friend Alice it wasn’t his job to get involved. There’s so often a price to pay, whether it’s embarrassment or fear or abuse sometimes, when you try and solve a stranger’s problem. I called Rose on Saturday. I wanted to know if she regretted having stepped in. If she’s worried the police missed something. And if she feels… nervous. “I still think she was mistreating her child. And that she needs help.” I could hear her sons playing with pans in the background. “I do avoid that bus stop now. I hate that. But mainly,” she said, “I hate that this experience might make me think twice about ever intervening again.” Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman |