The woman pinches his arm and when he cries, she swears and tells him he’s bad. What should you do, if anything?
On a packed bus one recent Saturday, I watched an ugly scene unfold. A mother shaking a boy aged perhaps six or seven. Not super-hard, you understand, but borderline rough. Then the boy complained to his mother that she had punched him.
“That wasn’t a punch,” she said. “That was a push.” To drive home the point, she pushed him, right in the center of his chest. This,” – she hit his arm – “is a punch. I suppose you’ll go telling everyone that I’ve been hitting you now?”
The boy sank to the floor of the bus and started to cry. I stared disapprovingly at the woman but she didn’t notice.
“Get up,” the mother said. If he didn’t, she warned, she’d pull him up by his ear.
“Why are you so bad?” she kept on. “None of my other children are bad like you are.”
He started to cry. For three bus-stops, I stood there, like some strap-hanging Hamlet, wondering whether or not to act. To intervene or not to intervene? That is always the question when you see something like this – an incident not violent enough to warrant a panicked call to 999, but disturbing enough to make you very worried.
As I stood there, I debated. The first thing to be considered was the Snapshot of a Bad Moment possibility. I’ve had my share of Bad Moments myself, and I challenge any honest parent to say otherwise: there were times I’d been so pissy with my kids that, had a stranger seen me in passing, they’d be tempted to send me for a time-out.
But as the minutes ticked by, it became clear that this wasn’t a case of just a bad-tempered comment or a single too-rough touch. The woman seemed to have it in for this particular child. Her three other children were sitting placidly with their balloons, and another adult – a husband? A brother? – sat beside her. “Why are you so bad?” she asked the boy. “None of my other children are as bad as you are.”
Still, I couldn’t quite screw up the nerve. The bus was packed, but nobody else was doing anything. I found the woman’s behaviour loathesome, but that was my opinion. As the woman herself had pointed out, what one person deems a push might be another person’s punch. What one parent calls discipline, another might call abuse.
The boy began to cry.
“Now all the other people on this bus are going to have to listen to you crying,” sighed the woman. “I feel for them, I really do.”
Time was short: my stop was next. I leaned over. “You know, I actually don’t mind hearing your child crying,” I said evenly, my voice as low as I could manage. “What I do mind is listening to the way you’ve been treating him.”
“I don’t know what you do where you’re from,” retorted the woman, who’d picked up on my American accent. “But in this country, we don’t interfere in what’s not our business.”
I got off the bus and burst into tears. “That was awful,” said a man who had also got off. “You were right to say something.”
But had I been right? Or had I not said enough? Watching the bus pull away, I wondered if I should phone the police. Or whether I should have done that in the first place instead of addressing the mother herself.
“We all have a responsibility to speak out when we see a child harmed in public,” says John Cameron, head of child protection services at theNational Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). “But it’s easier said than done.”
The fear of confrontation or even violence and the nuances of each particular situation conspire against there being one definitive answer about whether or not to intervene.
Later, when I looked up, “child abuse” on the internet I would eventually find a 2006 Department of Education report, What to do if You’re Worried a Child is being Abused.” But its guidelines were for people who work with children, professionals charged with their care who could observe them over time. It wasn’t so much designed for members of the public who happened to see ugly scenes on buses or in the street or supermarket. I’ve lived in this country for the better part of 20 years and I still didn’t know the standard protocol for such situations. Neither, it turns out, did my British friends. One suggested that I should have gone to the bus driver. Another offered that I should have videoed it for the child protection authorities.
That’s what one bus passenger in the US did earlier this month. The video, which went viral on the internet, shows a mother on a public bus in Philadelphia, in what appears to be a drug-induced daze, as her little girl tries to hold her drooping head up. It led to the city’s Department of Human Services removing the child from her mother’s care, according to the Philadelphia media.
Despite the video, officials said they were disappointed that more passengers hadn’t complained. “There’s very little reason why 15 calls to 911 [emergency services] weren’t received,” a police chief told the Philadelphia Daily News. “I don’t think there’s anyone who can watch that and say, ‘Ah, that’s a shame,’ and just walk away.”
In my case, I did walk away, increasingly worried that I’d done the wrong thing. Or rather, the right thing in the wrong way. What if the woman, shamed at being called out in public, took it out on the boy at home?
Deciding when to intervene in a public space requires “a quick calculation on the degree of risk,” says Sue Berelowitz, deputy children’s commissioner for England. “One does have to think: if I would intervene when I see that parent chastising their child in public, then what the hell are they doing in private?”
If you’re a member of the public, the risk is that you don’t know who the child is and have no means of monitoring the family – you have no idea what will happen at home.
“Ultimately, the decision of whether a child is a victim of abuse or not lies with social services,” says Berelowitz. “So if you’re worried, call the police. You cannot make that decision. Someone else needs to do the assessment and make the decision.”
In a public space, where you don’t want to risk confrontation, or possible violence, one might decide to keep a distance, make the call and then keep the family in your sights until the authorities arrive: “You can decide that you’re not going to let the child out of your sight until the police arrive,” she suggests.
If it’s a matter of a parent simply losing their cool with a child, it sometimes works to offer to your help, suggests John Cameron of the NSPCC. “It’s often not productive to go over and confront the parent – people just get defensive. Instead of asking them to justify their behaviour, it can help to go over and say something like, ‘Kids can be really difficult. Is there anything I can do to help?’”
Ultimately, say officials, it’s better to err on the side of caution. “There are no defined criteria as to when a person should or should not report the abuse of a child to the authorities,” says Chief Constable Simon Bailey, of the Association of Chief Police Officers. “We would, however, encourage members of the public to exercise their own judgment, erring on the side of caution, and report what they have seen to the police.”
That allows the police to assess the incident alongside any other information they may have on the child.
I could, it turns out, also have called the NSPCC’s hotline, which receives most of its calls from the public. Last year, in the wake of high-profile abuse scandals, such as the Jimmy Savile case, the volume of calls rose 15%, with callers using words like “duty” and “responsibility” when describing why they called.
“If you’re uncertain about something you’ve seen and left feeling uneasy, call,” says Cameron. “We can help you tease through details and figure out what in the picture is important and what’s not.”
It’s rare that such calls come in without small clues as to the family’s identity: a school uniform or a license plate number in the car-park can help in tracing them. Once, after someone phoned in a family altercation in a restaurant, the NSPCC worked with the police to find the family through their credit card bill details.
As for the boy I saw on the bus, I wish I had phoned a professional, instead of confronting his mother. Or rather than confronting her, had asked her if I could help. I owe him thanks: because of him, I’ll know better next time.
The NSPCC’s telephone hotline for adults concerned about the welfare of a child: 0808 800 5000. Or email: help@nspcc.org.uk
On a packed bus one recent Saturday, I watched an ugly scene unfold. A mother shaking a boy aged perhaps six or seven. Not super-hard, you understand, but borderline rough. Then the boy complained to his mother that she had punched him.
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