In my time at the University of Virginia I have been constantly reminded about the dangers of the “bystander effect.” Within just a couple of weeks in the fall of 2011, I received an email both from University President Teresa Sullivan and Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer Patricia Lampkin about its dangers. Sullivan’s email to the entire University community challenged us to question whether we really are a caring community. Sullivan claimed that the biggest barrier facing our community was the bystander effect, a phenomenon that often prevents people reaching out and helping each other. The bystander effect was again addressed in an email to the University student body from Lampkin, commemorating the two years since Morgan Harrington had disappeared in front of John Paul Jones Arena. It described the bystander effect as stemming from “apathy, wanting to go along with the crowd, and not speaking up or intervening when disturbing behavior occurs, [and] can mean the difference between life and death.” Since then this same message has been reiterated to me through interactions with RAs and even the Stall Seat Journal — safety is everyone’s responsibility, so a safe community starts with you.
Yet despite all this rhetoric, I do not believe that the administration is truly dedicated to ending the bystander effect in the University student body. I say this based on the hypocritical way they have not only actively ignored, but also discouraged student involvement in, the Living Wage Campaign. We, as students, are meant to speak up about situations and behaviors we see harming members of our community, but not if that means critiquing the University. The administration has (quite successfully) created an atmosphere where “speaking up or intervening” is actively discouraged. This was made quite clear last year when students involved with the Living Wage Campaign were threatened with suspension, expulsion or even arrest. It was reaffirmed this past week when at the No More Excuses rally, the Living Wage protesters were offered 10 silent seats at the Board of Visitors meeting. As protestor Anup Gampa so poignantly said: “we don’t want business as usual… we don’t want to be quiet.”
The Hoos Making a Safer Community at the University of Virginia website was launched in 2011 to combat bystander behavior at the University primarily through its online violence prevention training program. According to this webpage the official University policy is to “promote a safe environment in which to learn and work by strictly prohibiting threats or acts of violence by or against members of the University community.” It appears that the University does not view paying workers below a living wage as committing an act of violence against a member of our community. Yet is this actually the case?
The term “structural violence,” often associated with Johan Galtung’s “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” is defined as a “form of violence where some social structure, or social institution purportedly harms people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs.” I would argue that not paying University employees a living wage is a form of structural violence as it helps keep people from breaking the cycle of poverty. Since a living wage is defined as the minimum hourly wage necessary for a worker to afford the necessities essential to an acceptable standard of living, including adequate shelter and food, then paying workers less than that is likely to cause them to end up in debt. Without the ability to save they will be unable to move to a better school district where housing costs may be higher, which limits their children’s ability to get into college, let alone compete for scholarships or financial aid. Without access to higher education, their children are likely to work minimum wage jobs, continuing to be stuck in the cycle of poverty.
We often respond to the brutality of physical violence, because it is easily noticeable, but structural violence is overseen due to the way it is invisibly integrated into our social structures. Yet structural violence is just as damaging as physical violence to a community, and is affected far more by the bystander effect. It is too easy to be apathetic about the negative effects produced by societal institutions, because we are so habituated to the system that we are blinded to the damage it is doing. Though some may think it is a bit dramatic to call instituting a living wage a matter of life and death, it certainly has a significant impact on the health of workers.
That a group of students is willing to say, “Enough is enough,” even when the majority of the student body is staying silent is exactly the sort of non-bystander behavior that our community should be fostering. The systemic way in which hundreds of low-skilled workers are trapped in a cycle of poverty due to the University’s unwillingness to pay a living wage is a sort of violence that I think should be against U.Va.’s policy. The University needs to recognize that combating the bystander effect is not something they should encourage students to do selectively, or we will never be able to become the type of safe and caring community we strive to be.
Anna-Sofia Olesen Yurtaslan is a graduate student in the Batten School.
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