While I, like another poster, am old enough that protecting a woman under attack nearby is ingrained…I am not sure I would physically tackle another over a purse.
Maybe I am only half a man
The ‘don’t get involved culture’ seems to be strong though. I, as a young man, was visiting Los Angeles for the first time where I was a country bumbkin never had been much in a big city. While I was there…there was a commotion where a man was running down the up escalator at a shopping area. (I was heading down)…He came racing down and a police officer braced himself at the bottom. The man decided to keep going and hit the prepared officer body wise at the bottom. There was a struggle but the man got away with the officer holding his shirt. He was hurt in the ankle I think and was distracted and didn’t see where the man went. 2 other officers raced in to help their fellow and one addressed us…and there was like 60 of us that had seen it…he wanted to know where the man went. Of the 60, NOT ONE helped. I then shouted and pointed which direction/corner the man went.
I am still a bit puzzled by this to this day even ifit happened over 30 years ago.
Which men? Which women? A 93-year-old man with serious movement difficulties and an on-duty armed police officer who happens to be female? I very much doubt she’d want him to get in the way.
People who are capable of doing so are morally, but usually not legally, required to protect any human, and some animals, in their vicinity who are in actual need of protection.
People who are not capable of doing so, for whatever reason (which doesn’t necessarily have to do with physical strength), but who are capable of calling for help, are morally but not usually legally required to do that.
However, some people freeze in such situations, and shouldn’t be blamed for doing so (with the possible exception of those who’ve willingly taken a job that requires such action and who have been provided with relevant training). And nobody who hasn’t been in such situations knows in advance what they would actually do.
None of this has anything to do with what gender anybody is. Nor does it have much of anything to do with whether the person who is or isn’t rendering aid feels as if they’ve been disrespected by the person needing aid. And it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with whether the person who is or isn’t rendering aid feels as if they’ve been disrespected by some other people altogether who happen to share gender with the one(s) being attacked.
That’s a brilliant cover for a mugging. I seem to recall a comic book or TV plot that involved bank robbers bringing a fake film crew to a heist so bystanders wouldn’t interfere.
I glance over and notice Person A attacking Person B, so I go over and stop the attack. Person B runs away in terrified. Person A says what the fuck, man, they just grabbed my phone out of my hand, and I was trying to get it back! Now Person B is gone and I have aided them in their theft (assuming Person A is being truthful).
Which is to say that one’s genuine moral obligation should be to get a situation under control if one can and try to understand the nature of the conflict, rather than just stepping in to prevent violence. If it is absolutely clear what is happening, action is warranted, but the moral obligation should be not to make a situation possibly worse.
I think gender should play into your decision. You’re a guy, right? If so, odds are very high that not only are you stronger than the victim, you’re also stronger than the woman attacking her too. What if you spare the victim a minor injury by accidentally really hurting the other woman?
The bar should be higher for deciding to physically intervene when you outmatch both people involved in the fight.
I don’t think that’s a question of sex, though. My metric is whether I can take on the assailant without potentially not coming home to my family. In the case of the video, there’s no fucking way my 47-year-old ass is going to be of any help physically against a gang of crazy women. That they’re women is, sure, included in the overall risk assessment, but the overall risk assessment is what drives my decision to intervene or not. I’m not fighting a big woman who looks like she’s been in a scrap or two in her time anymore than an equivalent male.
When I say ‘get involved’ I think you are supposed to try and de-escalate first. I would try that regardless of gender. Sure, I may use my prominece, physically, as a male to de-escalate things between two women, but my goal would be to avoid at all costs getting physical.
Trying to be a third-party “hero” in a physical altercation is very risky, since you often don’t know the background of the situation.
Consider this scenario: you walk out of a bar and see a man punching a woman in the parking lot. She is crying and yelling “Stop!” but he keeps hitting her and yelling at her. You intervene and tell him to stop. He throws punches at you, and now you’re in a fight with him. A few seconds later the woman screams at you: “Stop hitting my man!” Now both of them are fighting you.
Unless you really know what’s going on, the smartest thing is to call the cops and be a witness.
You are wildly overestimating how strong women are.
I have a female cousin who is significantly stronger than the average woman. But if I wanted or needed to overpower her for some reason, I could do so without any real difficulty. And I don’t do any sort of exercise beyond brisk walks.
While that is most often true it’s not just about strength. The average man in our society isn’t a trained fighter (neither are most women, but I digress). The average man against a woman who is trained in how to fight might not come out of the melee so good. Also, maybe the woman is armed with some sort of weapon she just hasn’t pulled out of her pocket until that point. You just don’t know.
Part of the problem in the case of the video/incident in question is that it’s not just two women. It’s a gang of women, and numbers count. One man wading into that situation is going to have his ass handed to him not because women are stronger (they aren’t) but because there are more of them. You’d need a bunch of men willing to intervene to have any hope at all of stopping the attack.
I’m skeptical about how much protection this really offers. Does this law actually prevent an attorney from filing a lawsuit against you? Or is it just a really good defense if it happens?
As to the OP’s question: As part of my (by choice) additional training before carrying concealed, I was shown a series of “yes or no” videos depicting events. I guessed wrong on about half of them. Of course, they were chosen to show situations where the “bad guys” were easily mis-identified, but it drove home the point about getting involved.
So, as an older, somewhat weaker guy who’s almost always armed, my only choice is the “nuclear option”. I have no requirement to be involved at all, beyond summoning help.
I truly don’t know. Maybe one of our Legal Eagles will chime in. I doubt if you can prevent an attorney from doing anything that they want to do, or that someone will pay them to do. It’s prolly just a good defense. If you can get a good defense attorney
