This post was contributed by Dr Laura Lammasniemi, Module Convenor for Criminal law.
Warning: Please note that this blog contains discussion on sexual assault.
What are our responsibilities towards our fellow men, or more specifically for the purposes of this blog – our fellow women – in public spaces?
I was left wondering this question while reading about the horrendous crimes committed by a man called Ryan Johnston. In December 2023, Ryan Johnston was sentenced and jailed for 14 years for multiple sexual offences including rape, attempted rape, two counts of sexual assault, and one count of outraging public decency.
The rape was committed in London underground on the Piccadilly Line in the early hours of the morning, with other people present in the carriage during the attack. The victim, aged 20, was on her way home from a night out with friends and was unconscious. Johnston, described by the Crown Prosecution Service as a sexual predator, firstly sexually assaulted and then raped the unconscious woman. The crime was reported to the police by a French tourist who witnessed the crime with his 11-old year-old child. The man later returned to England to testify. This case echoes a similar case from Philadelphia (USA) in 2021 when a man raped a woman in a moving train while bystanders witnessed various parts of the attack without intervention.
The crimes and their public nature are shocking and raise several questions.
Why do people look away when they witness vulnerable people being seriously harmed? Should there be a legal or a moral duty to intervene?
Maybe those present did not act out of fear. It could also be that they did not act because of the bystander effect, a theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim in the presence of other people. The theory suggests people have a weaker sense of responsibility in groups. The larger the group, the less likely it is that anyone will come to help. Maybe the normalisation and prevalence of sexual offending also contributed to the decisions of bystanders to look away.
While the French tourist did call for help, neither him nor anyone else in the carriage had a legal duty to do so. There is no Good Samaritan law or overall omission liability in England. There has been a long debate about the limits of omission liability in English criminal law and about its possible expansion, yet the law is settled for what it is.
The legal rules are clear, yet moral questions remain answered. When sexual harassment, taking of photos in secret, or even such brutal physical attacks happen in public, it can take a while for those present to understand what is happening.
When they do realise and choose to look the other way, surely inaction creates moral, even if not legal, culpability. Do you agree? You can discuss this in the comments below.
Further reading
Andrew Ashworth, ‘The Scope of Criminal Liability for Omissions’ (1989) 105 LQR 424. Accessible from the University of London Library.
Glanville Williams, ‘Criminal Omissions-The Conventional View’ (1991) 107 LQR 88. Accessible from the University of London Library.
Dear Laura. Perhaps you are looking at it from the law perspective. Morals do not occur out of thin air. An individual perspective and a system perspective is involved. Individual perspective might be divided into further two categories: “fight or flight” in the face of danger and when you do understand what is involved (I.e, a sexual assault on another person) and the second category might involve past experiences (the way you were brought up, the place you were brought up etc.) A systems perspective involves a holistic approach of societal attributes. The system perspective might be more of an issue in this particular case. After all it was the French that called for help!
Disclaimer: personal views….
There are a number of situations where it would be in the victims best interest for someone to intervene – pick any violent crime. Since anyone could be a victim, then by extension it is in all of societies best interest for someone to intervene. This is a multilayered problem.
By the very nature of what is being witnessed, and by the fact that there is more utility to intervene in increasingly terrible events, the potential intervener knows that the person they must confront is violent and criminal. That knowledge greatly increases the chance of harm on confrontation and thereby raises the bar possibly past where willingness is not greater than risk.
Speaking more generally regarding introducing penalty for omission; to first contrast- committing an act good or criminal requires time. Time for a person to take any action is limited, and so commission requires using up a portion of your individual amount of time.
Therefore, commission has a limiting factor and is specific.
Omission is potentially boundless.
There are more things that I did not or cannot do than one can even fathom, and the list grows every second. The future can be thought of a set of probabilities of actions and outcomes. Each second you make one action concrete by your choices, there it becomes history. The literally infinite other possibilities evaporate, and are replaced simultaneously by an infinite number more for the next second.
There is a timeframe problem and a practical geography problem. Currently, you and I are logging or reading entries and not stopping crimes that are inevitably occurring somewhere in the world. How close is close enough?
There is an awareness and mind set problem. Did I knowingly omit the actions? Or was I not just not aware? How do you prove which one?
Questions regarding how to slice omission may also be boundless, and I will admit I have asked too many of them below for one post.
A reasonable person test may be applicable, but who decides what is reasonable?
Should a small or frail person be held to the same standard as a heavyweight boxer to confront a violent offender? Should a person in the next seat on a train be considered better suited to act by proximity and so the person at the back of the train be off the hook? Is everyone on the train guilty of omission? If the event is live streamed with the location easy to identify near a landmark, and the crime takes place over a long timeframe with a schedule announced by the offender, are all viewers guilty of omission if they do not go to stop it? If it makes national news while still occurring is the entire country guilty provided enough time? How many crimes that I should intervene in are occurring at once in an area that I could reach? Is a person at a demonstration that turns into a riot guilty in every case of not stopping all of the people looting ?
Thank you for your original post – I am very much for protecting others and standing up against injustice. Finding boundaries to a problem is important. Now to find cases in common law that may hold some of the answers…
This was a heartbreaking incident that happened to the victim, I don’t blame the people who were in the train that witnessed it because we never know how we ourselves would act to help someone in need. Sometimes, when bad things happen we lose our senses and don’t know what to do.
I still think that helping others in need are something that should be left as a moral obligation, the law is not the dictator of societal morals, the law is the order that is put in the chaos (the chaos is the ever-changing views of our society).
There are other ways to reprimand the witnesses of the crime, public media shame perhaps, educating the public to help others in need, raising awareness of what to do when crimes happen in education systems.
These I would argue are more effective than resorting to the criminal law to punish as a result of resentment towards witnesses who did not help the victim.
Thank you for sharing this important and thought-provoking post. It’s truly disheartening to hear about such horrendous crimes and the bystander effect that often accompanies them. It serves as a stark reminder of the moral and ethical responsibilities we have towards one another in public spaces. It’s imperative that we continue to raise awareness about these issues and work towards creating a society where bystanders feel empowered and compelled to intervene when they witness wrongdoing.