Across the Western world, support for bystander intervention in intimate partner violence (IPV) is enshrined within government policies, fostering the expectation that community members have a moral obligation to intervene to disrupt and prevent IPV. However, IPV situations are often highly complex, and research demonstrates that there are significant risks that prevent victims from seeking help. Research also shows that victims exercise great care and agency in deciding which risks they are, or are not, willing to take. Critically, there is limited understanding of if and how the risks that prevent victims from help-seeking persist—or, indeed, are exacerbated—when a bystander subverts a victim’s agency to intervene on their behalf. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with IPV victims and service providers, this paper examines victims’ firsthand experiences of bystander intervention, with a particular focus on their perceptions of risk and their sense of agency in managing their own safety. We found that bystanders’ active interventions sometimes led victims to make decisions or take actions that they were not yet ready to take, and often increased the sense of risk victims were feeling. Victims then took responsibility for managing this increased risk, which added to the already heavy burden they were carrying in trying to keep themselves and their children safe. Our findings point to the critical need for more evidence to build a robust understanding of the contexts and complexities that contribute to a bystander’s intervention being experienced as helpful or harmful, and this evidence must be directly informed by victims themselves.
Kuskoff et al. (Sun,) studied this question.