A Skeptic's Guide to Bystanding

by·stand·er noun \ˈbī-ˌstan-dər\ Definition of BYSTANDER : one present but not taking part in a situation or event : a chance spectator

Blogging during the school holidays is hard, if not impossible, but while I was busy with family holiday stuff, somebody pointed me towards the fact that Alicia Hamberg has declared that her smear campaign, including her carefully chosen hateful words towards me, are not in any way her responsibility because she is, wait for it, “a complete bystander”.

Now I’m no skeptic, but mmm whoops I felt a slightly skeptical moment coming on... a complete bystander - really?

My first thought was to say that, in my opinion, there is really no such thing as a “complete” bystander in a bullying situation. I’ve experienced enough bullying in my life, and watched enough people pretending they can’t see it going on, to know that the concept of a bystander, as a get-out clause for being prepared to watch other people get trashed, doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

For obvious reasons I don’t generally tend to read the smears that Alicia likes to write in order to foment the contempt of others towards me, but when someone pointed out to me that she’d been writing this kind of thing, I thought, hello, that doesn’t sound right. 

So I decided to investigate.

I remembered reading a tweet, that I can’t now find, saying that the average bullying bout lasts about 60 seconds if bystanders get involved. So I googled that and that’s when I found this useful page from Eyes on Bullying about bystanding.

And I also found out I was wrong about the 60 seconds, because it’s actually only 10 seconds. Yep, that’s just 10 seconds that someone gets to roughly push democratic communication and manners aside and take a little bit of something that belongs to someone else - their sense of well-being - and begin to squeeze them. And that's just the sort of thing, according to this article, that stops within 10 seconds fully half the time if bystanders get involved.

The article is really interesting and if you have a look at it, you may recognise some roles you’ve played in the past. I certainly did. It helpfully points out the fact, pretty obvious if you think about it at all, that any truly “passive” existence as a bystander must end the very second that you become fully conscious of the situation. Then you have choices and whatever you do, you will be making them.

So guess what, in the story of trying to work with a school to address bullying, even I’m a bystander, yes, me, the apparent cause of all the trouble for ‘complaining’ about bullying!  As well as being a parent concerned for my own child, I was also a bystander being invited to watch other children get bullied. I chose to get involved on behalf of other people’s children, not just mine. When I say people were encouraging me to address this, I am telling the solid truth - here’s an excerpt from an email a Trustee’s wife wrote me two days before the school flung my kids out:

"Yes, I think it is time to over-haul the schools approach to bullying. It appears to have been an on going issue for some time (many years). I am curious to know what they say about past events, especially where families have left the school due to this issue being unresolved. How have they justified their actions in the past?

[...]

It's much easier not to address the problem.....but I hope you do have the will to keep persuing it as co-operatively as possible."

According to the Eyes on Bullying page, taking those kinds of actions in a bullying situation can be termed “helpful” bystanding. Clearly, having observed what was taking place, if I had remained silent about it, not only would I have been failing in my legal duty to protect my own child, but I would have been silently acquiescing to the bullying of other targets by remaining silent.

It’s just not possible to frame a choice to do nothing about bullying as ‘neutral’.  

“bystanders rarely play a completely neutral role, although they may think they do”.  

So at this point in my investigation, I concluded that although Alicia might conceivably be a bystander, the idea of a ‘complete’ bystander must be informed by the kind of thinking that assumes non-action can possibly be neutral if someone is getting bullied in front of you and indeed her choice to use the the word “complete” in front of the word “bystander” does make it look as if Alicia wants to be as far along the path of non-responsibility as wishful thinking can propel her.

(That it is merely wishful thinking is easily shown by her statements elsewhere, for example here, where she claims that she loathes that very behaviour in others: "If you see someone, even if it's just a complete stranger, getting beaten up by a thug, it's not really the moment for walking away, humming happily 'blessed are the peacemakers'")

But then I had another look at the definition of bystanding and I started to wonder if it could  actually apply to Alicia at all.

The first thing that doesn’t add up is “present but not taking part”. This doesn’t apply, because the events that Alicia tells people that were all our fault, the ones we’re mediating with Human Rights about, she wasn’t present at at all, so she’s not really a bystander in that sense.  (The Eyes on Bullying page refers to bystanders as being people who watch the bullying or hear about it, but the 'critics' only heard about it through our site, which they began discussing before we even knew the 'critics'  existed.)

So are there any events that Alicia has been present at and where she might have been a bystander? Well yes, her own public mobbing of us, and her own defamatory comments, which started when we encouraged others to speak out about bullying and mobbing and promptly got mobbed - by her and her mates.

But I don’t think Alicia can reeeeely claim to be a ‘bystander’ at that, hmmm admiring someone for expelling bullied children isn’t really the same as ‘not taking part’ especially when you take the trouble to pepper your blog with notices so your readers know your (speculative) views - those are clearly highly targeted actions designed to destroy our reputation in terms of the common interests that we all share together.  

And in fact that's the next bit of the definition, which states that to be a bystander you have to be a “chance spectator”.  

Well I suppose you could say that becoming acquainted with Alicia Hamberg, and Melanie Byng and the other Steiner 'critics',  was chance, in as much as we happened to become aware of one another on the internet, but the reality is that we have shared interests and given the very small niche of others with those interests, within the broader ‘skeptical’ community, it was in fact extremely unlikely that we would not come across one another at some point. Yes, whether Alicia and her ‘bystander’ friends like it or not, I’m another human being with a public interest in a subject that they also explore publicly.  

So to be a bystander as far as that part of the definition is concerned it would have to be chance. And then, once that chance had occurred, a bystander would “not take part” whereas what Alicia and her friends Melanie Byng, Diana Winters, Pete Karaiskos and others have done is to act on their dislike of us to make many speculative negative judgements, joining together to try and overwhelm our legitimate interests in the same area and to force us out.

Hardly bystanding.

So if Alicia wasn’t a bystander at any of the the original events at the school, and if she wasn’t either a bystander in terms of our ‘interactions’ with Steiner Skeptic “critics”, because she was the person actively instigating mobbing, defamation, and reputation destruction, in what sense could she be said to be a bystander at all?

All the evidence in fact points to Alicia Hamberg being an active perpetrator, using her own wish to destroy us as a pretext for making speculative judgments about prior events at the school, at which she was not present.

So predictably Alicia’s blog now has “speculation” disclaimers, but they only serve as a virtual admission that she wasn’t actually present at the events that she’s now busy making speculative judgements about!  So all they do is highlight the desire of Alicia Hamberg and her friends to make those kind of speculative judgements in the first place.

But, right in tune with that wishful thinking of hers, that visceral desire to destroy us, our initiative and our legitimate interests in the same area, needs to be framed by Alicia as some sort of external compulsion. So Alicia uses phrases like “I have to do this” as a justification why she’s got to say that we’re liars, that "the demands and expectations they place on other people significantly exceed what any human being is likely to be able to give them", or whatever, in order to undemocratically exclude us from public territory on our mutual interests.

Obviously these phrases are supposed to create the impression that Alicia is somehow unwilling, reluctant even, to try to ruin our reputation in the way she has done, but the language is unconvincing when there is so much obvious relish in the insults and speculative judgement that she is meting out, not to mention the underhand techniques that we’ve documented being used in executing their dissemination.

So Alicia wrote that she "had to" quote what the Manager of the school said to a journalist - i.e. it wasn’t her defaming us, it was the words of the man who expelled a bullied child from a notorious bullying school (of a type she and her friends spend their time criticising) that would prove that everything we said was lies. 

Even if it was true that Alicia’s has felt some sort of compulsion to get involved, “having to" post defamatory things about people which you have to admit are speculation would seem to me to be more on the turets end of the spectrum than the “complete bystanding” one.

The original points of difference between us in regard to our mutual interests can be seen here and here. It was totally legitimate for Alicia to question me about my attitude towards others with shared interests, as she did when I wrote this post, and I responded democratically, by listening to her point, agreeing with it, apologising for any toe-treading and expressing my desire and willingness to share the space of our mutual interests.

Following that, the mobbing began and it was severe and long-lasting.  And this is what Alicia is trying to frame as her being a ‘complete bystander’.

Here are some of the things Alicia and her other skeptical bystanding buddies have done that she wishes to fit into the definition of being a “complete bystander”:

- Encouraging others to have “nothing to do” with us.

- Naming blog posts after me in which she defames me repeatedly but where I’m banned from defending myself. 

- Public name-calling and insults.

- Admiring the school, speculatively, for expelling the children as a solution to us asking them to deal with the bullying.

- Spreading untruths to her followers on her blog and on Twitter.

- Several people we’ve communicated with have confirmed that they’ve been warned by either her or Melanie Byng to be ‘careful’ of us. 

None of that sounds in the least like bystanding to me and it was at this point that the helpful page on bystanding came to the rescue again, because stuff like this falls into the category of ‘hurtful’ bystanding, in which according to Eyes on Bullying:

Some bystanders . . . instigate the bullying by prodding the bully to begin.

Other bystanders . . . encourage the bullying by laughing, cheering, or making comments that further stimulate the bully. 

And other bystanders . . . join in the bullying once it has begun. 

Most bystanders . . . passively accept bullying by watching and doing nothing. Often without realizing it, these bystanders also contribute to the problem. Passive bystanders provide the audience a bully craves and the silent acceptance that allows bullies to continue their hurtful behavior.

“Ignore. Mad as cheese” (Melanie Byng)

"She’s not only shooting herself in the foot [referring to my walking impairment], now… she’s shooting the bullied children too!" (Pete Karaiskos)

“I continue to hope that if their claim is rejected, there will be a penalty for filing a frivolous claim" (Diana Winters)
"I choose not to be involved [...]. So I don't take sides" (Shane Wiremu) - yet here he is, not taking sides

“there are only so many battles" (anonymous 'critic' @lovelyhorse_)

“personal baggage” (Local Schools Network - no-one wanted to put their name to that)

“the mobbing may be real or imagined - it doesn't concern me either way." (Mike Collins)

“best ignored” (Andy Lewis)

So my research suggests that the critics as a group, with some of the wider group of Skeptics, have (consciously or unconsciously) taken on the role of a group of ‘hurtful bystanders’ and to try to destroy our interests, where others, including the Human Rights, recognise them as legitimate.  

Now, presumably due to our continual and robust observation that there is no evidence for Alicia’s speculative judgements, she’s decided to cite our original correspondence with the school as the ‘evidence’ she’s been looking for as to why our demands were so great that no human being could possibly meet them ("you'll notice their demands are far more extreme than mere 'complaints"). What she’s banking on there, is that no-one will look too deeply but just gang up with her, on her 'completely bystanding' say so, which has been a pretty successful tactic actually.

But in reality of course, the judgement as to whether or not reminding a school in writing of its fiduciary duties towards children, is indeed beyond human reasonableness, or in fact an urgent necessity, must depend on what was going on there at the time and... oh look we’re straight back to Alicia not being there and therefore not meeting the definition of a bystander at all.

And of course Alicia Hamberg and her friends know perfectly well that they weren’t there and aren't in a position to know what happened, as they are also clearly aware that if two parties both have legitimate interests in an area and something personal goes wrong between you, democracy demands that you separate the personal bit from the rest of it otherwise you may compromise another’s legitimate interests.

But Melanie Byng did not do that, when we met her last year, purely due to our shared interests in Steiner Ed, and she immediately moved beyond that and enthusiastically introduced all those very personal initiatives last Summer.

When problems occurred with her own initiatives, (none of them came from anywhere else), instead of simply apologising and moving on, to keep the ‘legitimate interests’ part intact, Melanie sacrificed our legitimate interests to her need not to take responsibility, cut off all communications, blocked us on Twitter etc.,

There simply isn’t any acceptable reason to exclude people with legitimate interests from democratic exchange about shared interest subjects.

The only reason to exclude them would be if their interests were not legitimate.

And that explains why, when she couldn't take responsibility for her own personal mistakes, she and her skeptical ‘critic’ friends set about trying to delegitimise our in interests in "their area" through mobbing and defamation, as that way there would be no problem excluding us.

And they’ve been doing exactly that ever since.

That’s how we got to this scenario where the ‘critics’ are slamming people for standing up to the very same bullying that they themselves flag up. And as you might expect, they now talk about bullying less, as they need to play it down.

So, in spite of bullying at Steiner being one of the main, if not the main, problems flagged up in most testimonials, anonymous or otherwise, and in spite of the evidence we’ve gathered of it being a very long-term problem at that school, in our case, it has to now be portrayed as us making a big fuss about nothing - otherwise there wouldn't be a viable reason to exclude us, as people mediating with Human Rights,  from the field of mutual interests.

And Melanie having fudged the issues, now writes things like this on Alicia’s Blog "I’m happy to let their ghastly folie à deux play out", (that’s us objecting to being sidelined from the public debate by her cack-handed response to her own failures).  She then goes on... 

“It will end in tears, but they won’t be ours”.  That doesn’t really sound like bystanding to me, more of a threat actually.

I’ve certainly found this webpage on bystanders very helpful indeed.  

The understanding of the realities about being bystanders explains so much including that we all have to decide what kind of bystander to be, the helpful kind or the hurtful kind, and that includes all those people and followers who become aware of the kinds of things Steiner Skeptics have been saying and doing. 

It’s certainly true to say that within the area of our mutual interests, their ‘bystanding’ activities have reduced our participation in pursuing those interests publicly, since, based on Alicia’s original speculative attacks on us, (which many of those above admit they haven’t even read), this group have closed the wagons in order to exclude us from any shared interests in that field, and now people we've never communicated with before admit that they've been pre-warned.

Among Skeptics, using your influence as a ‘hurtful bystander’ to exclude others with legitimate interests is obviously a fairly successful tactic. 

The simple truth is that Alicia Hamberg’s opinion of me is actually none of my business. If she kept it to herself, instead of trying to influence others to distrust and dislike me, if we had no shared interests, and if the future well-being of some other children might honestly not depend on what happens about those interests, it could just stay like that. 

But trying to disrupt our legitimate participation in public discourse about our shared interests, even to the detriment of the whole subject (would other whistleblowers speak up in such a climate of aggression?), by barking speculative defamatory judgements about us on the internet, is certainly NOT “complete” bystanding.

I’m now satisfied that it’s not bystanding at all. 

Misrepresenting actively joining in with a fight, as some sort of passive non-involvement, is something which should be beneath contempt for anyone who wants others to believe that they are sceptical, critical thinkers.  

Skeptics generally are on a very high moral platform of public good at the moment by being really really bossy about using evidence for everything but if they are willing to behave like bullies, moving around the internet as a gang of hurtful bystanders - watching their mates ‘speculatively’ duff up people who are at least trying to protect children from harm, that just makes them into a joke.

There are certainly going to be a lot of ordinarily sceptical people who are just too attached to their humanity to sell it out like that, just to be a member of a club that's prepared to behave like this.

So far there have been very few helpful bystanders (thanks to all those who have offered support), but saying that there have been few actually does little to describe the horrible nature of the psychological and emotional effect produced by being the target of such a broad smear campaign, whilst simultaneously dealing with the first ever Human Rights mediation with a Steiner School about bullying!

It’s such a relief in a way to sum it up like this, because it shows that it really isn’t my problem, even though the effects of it are nasty, I simply know that I wouldn’t treat anyone like that as I don’t like it, and find it hard to accept being a hurtful bystander, and that explains why I stood up at the school, and why we’re the ones talking to the Human Rights now, and Alicia and Diana and Melanie and Pete, those Skeptical Steiner ‘critics’, are all the ones carping that they hope it will fail.

So I’m clear now that people who buy into bullying, while pretending that they’re not, although they might technically sometimes still fit into the definition of bystanders, need to be qualified as behaving as ‘hurtful’ bystanders, and I’m grateful for that insight, and to understand that hurtful bystanding is still on the bullying continuum.

But this helpful Eyes on Bullying page, which is laid out in a very accessible manner, also shows that most of the acts and words we’ve documented from the Skepto-critics, are not bystanding at all and in reality they're not even remotely near the bystanding end of the bullying continuum.

Alicia Hamberg may very well be a complete something, but it’s certainly not a bystander.