Not just a bystander

14/02/15

I am sitting on the rooftop washing my underwear, just minding my own business when a guy comes up and sits down to my left. A girl follows behind him reluctantly, head bowed, she avoids looking at me as she walks past. He is upset about something and is speaking harshly in low gruff tones. She keeps her head down and turned away. Occasionally, he grabs her by the chin to force her to look at him or grabs her by the arm to prevent her from pulling away. He keeps repeating the same question “why? Huh? Why?” Then SLAP. I don’t see his hand move but the sound is unmistakeable. I stop washing and stare at the scene unfolding in front of me. He knows I am there watching – I can tell because he avoids eye contact with me – but he ignores me. A second slap. This time I yell “hey!” loudly. He continues to ignore me. He calls someone on his phone and forces her to speak to whoever it is. She says something off script and he slaps her again a bit harder this time. I yell again and this time he motions irritatedly at me to be quiet.

I don’t understand the argument, but I understand the behaviour. He is controlling and jealous; a bully with a bad temper.  The girl has her back to me and I can’t hear anything she says, but she is clearly afraid of him and I find it unlikely that this is the first time that he has treated her this way. By the fourth slap, I am really mad. This time I yell : “ If you are going to be an asshole, go do it somewhere else, not in front of me. You are not welcome here.” This time he pays attention. He marches over to where I am sitting on my low stool in front of my washing bucket. His posture and the way he looms over me so that I have to look up at him indicate that he is trying to intimidate me, only I don’t frighten that easily. I look him straight in the eyes…If looks could kill, this guy would have been annihilated.

He tells me not to interfere in his personal affairs. I tell him to stop being violent and I won’t. He says I don’t understand the problem, that she broke his heart. I say I don’t need to understand the problem, I understand violence and it is not a good way to solve your problems. He asks me if I think girls should get to do whatever they want. I tell him that is beside the point, the point is regardless of what she did or did not do, it doesn’t give him the right to hit her and abuse her. He tells me if I don’t like it, I should leave. I tell him that he is the one that needs to leave (I live there) and that he shouldn’t come back either. Eventually he gets fed up and goes back to terrorize the girl he is with only this time he drags her farther away from where I am sitting.

About a minute later, another friend comes up the stairs. I am relieved to have someone else there. My friend doesn’t really catch what is going on, but tells the guy to calm down a couple times when the guy gets a bit too aggressive. The guy disappears to go fetch the pieces of the girl’s phone which he threw off the balcony earlier in the argument. I tell my friend that he has been hitting the girl. My friend goes over to her – by now she is huddled on the floor against the railings in tears – they exchange a few words and my friend comes back explaining that she said the guy beats her and she wants to leave him. When the guy comes back he throws the pieces of phone at her then comes to sit for a moment with my friend. More friends arrive and are made aware of the situation.

The girl leaves with the guy and I am afraid for her – I think that once he gets her will take her somewhere else to continue the abuse uninterrupted, but he comes back after a few minutes. He avoids looking at me, but I am pretty sure he can feel the anger sweeping off me like heat waves. My friends sit him down and they have a “talk”. After, they tell me everything is okay and it won’t happen again, but all that means it that it won’t happen in front of us again. Next time that guy wants to slap a girl around, he will take her somewhere where there are no nosy foreigners around to interfere with his “personal affairs”.  I tell my friends that I don’t want the guy to be allowed back here. They make excuses for him saying things like “oh well, he was just angry…his application to go to Japan was rejected so he was having a bad day”. They brush his violence off as if it was not intentional, as if this was the only time he was ever violent (which I doubt), as if he didn’t really know what he was doing. But this is part of the problem, when we don’t hold perpetrators of violence accountable for their actions then they can continue being violent without anyone ever really questioning or challenging their behaviour. Well, today I challenged one guy’s behaviour and if he shows up here again, I will again hold him accountable for it. I will not pretend like nothing happened and like everything is just fine and dandy. I won’t react in anger again because that likely won`t be very productive and will only make him defensive and aggressive, but I do hope that by continuing to question his behaviour that he might eventually learn something from it. And not only him, but my friends as well. I hope that all of them have been given cause for reflection and that they might take the issue of men’s violence against women a bit more seriously next time and not brush it under the rug.

I am posting this in part because I was really shaken up by the incident (like literally, I was shaking I was so angry and upset) and writing is one way that I calm myself and work through strong emotions, but I also wanted to share my reflections because I think it is important to talk about these things. Intervening as a bystander (and in particular in this instance as a foreigner in another culture where I don’t speak the language) is never an easy thing to do and I am sure that while reading this many people might think that I could’ve/should’ve reacted in another way or done something different. I don’t think that there is ever an ideal situation of violence in which to intervene as a bystander and at the end of the day there will always be “what ifs” but I continue to believe that the important thing is to speak up, to engage people in dialogues about violence against women and other forms of violence and to continue reflecting and learning. It is the only way to make change happen.