User:AverageEccentric/Perpetrators, victims, and bystanders

Commentary: Not for publication ''My intent is to add this section to what exists already here. Because it is in a draft state it has not been proofread and the citations are quite rough (incorrectly formatted). Please don’t feel pressed to correct spelling, grammar, and citation issues for me. My primary challenge is that the available resources are vast for an assignment of ~800 words. ''

''While I have skimmed a dozen sources, I am only using a few. This is because all those sources refer back to these few, so it’s best to stick with them (for instance Ehrenreich and Cole). ''

Items in single brackets are something I’d like to link to another article, if they’re not part of a quote.

Addition to Introduction:
Initial analyses of atrocities such as the Holocaust discussed these events simply as violence by perpetrators against victims. Scholars added the category of "bystander" to include people who impact, and are impacted by, mass violence but who are not clearly perpetrators or victims (Donà, 2018, p. 3). Even with this added complexity most genocide research focuses on perpetrators, in part because evidence of their behavior is most accessible to scholars (Ehrenreich and Cole, 2005, p. 224). While research about bystanders' role in violence dates to the mid twentieth century (Fenton and Mott, 2017), research about their role in genocide is more recent (Donà, 2018, p.3). The template of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders is also being applied to emerging thoughts about cyberbullying and sexual assault on college campuses (Moretti and Herkovits 2021). Just as emerging research has added complexity to the triad as a whole, it continues to recognize nuance in each of the three roles. Anthropologist Alexander Hinton credits this research as sparking widespread public intolerance of mass violence, calling it a "proliferation of a post-cold war human rights regime that demanded action in response to atrocity and accountability for culprits" (Hinton, 2012, p. 6). 

Perpetrators
While it may seem clear who a "perpetrator" might be in an atrocity or act of violence, defining it specifically helps underscore why experts warn against assessing an atrocity as a simple battle between good and evil. Robert M. Ehrenreich and Tim Cole add to earlier scholarship from Raul Hilberg with their specific "prerequisites" for applying the perpetrator-victim-bystander triad (Ehrenreich and Cole, 2005, 215). Their definition of perpetrator, and use of these prerequisites, is heavily cited by other scholars. These four prerequisities include:


 * 1) Perpetrators hold the most power in the area where the conflict is taking place.  In addition to power, they must have "legitimacy, authority, and control within the region" (ibid).
 * 2) Conflict which Ehrenreich and Cole describe as "An actual or contrived stress must exist within the population of the region, which the perpetrators can exploit [to motivate support for their violence]" (ibid).
 * 3) The perpetrators blame this "actual or contrived stress" on a specific category of people. (ibid)  This category is "constructed": in other words, the individuals within the category created by the perpetrators might not consider themselves to be grouped in the same way. It might even defy evidence at hand to assert that those individuals genuinely constitute a single homogenous group separate from others.  Because of this power, Ehrenreich and Cole emphasize, "These characteristics allow the perpetrators to dictate ethnic identity" (p. 217).
 * 4) The groupings of perpetrator, victim, and bystander end when the act(s) of violence end.  (ibid).

Victims
Part of the violence enacted by perpetrators upon victims is in this way perpetrators define the identity of their victim population. By overwriting the victims' ways of defining themselves, and fabricating boundaries between the victim group and the overall population, perpetrators bring victims into a group of which they might not otherwise consider themselves a member, and separate them from groups to which they previously belonged. Even where the victims are not killed in mass violence, this "otherness" places them at risk for other forms of elimination such as cultural genocide or forced assimilation. In these ways, the victim group might be eliminated even if individuals from the group remain alive, which on its own meets several definitions of genocide. (Need to find citations for this section in our course materials from earlier in the term).

Ehrenreich and Cole describe the victims' place in mass atrocity this way:  "“the spectrum for the victim group is not one of power or action (i.e., degree of involvement in or avoidance of the destruction process) but reaction. The only decisions open to the victim group are what survival strategies to attempt at any given moment in order to avoid an immediate or impending action by the perpetrator group" (2005, p. 219). They go on to explain that victims' options are directly proportional to how rapidly the perpetrators are able to advance their acts of violence (ibid).

Bystanders
Most researchers admit the role of "bystander" is the most complex and dynamic of the perpetrator-victim-bystander triad. Giorgia Donà explains it in her 2018 research about the Rwandan Genocide as people who "neither partake in the act of violence nor flee from it" (2018, p. 3). She emphasizes the fluidity of the bystander role, noting:"'Boundaries between [roles] are often unclear and blurred and can change over time and across space. While certain identities may become characterized by their bystanding behaviours, it is important to note that bystanding is a behaviour and not a fixed identity, and thus one’s status as a bystander may change depending on personal circumstances or volitions' (Donà, 2018, p. 4)."A person, therefore, might shift between perpetrator, victim, and bystander and their bystander behavior may be influenced by the relative danger or safety of shifting to perpetrator or victim roles.

Ehrenreich and Cole explain bystanders have options "to support [or] avoid the perpetrator group" and to influence perpetrators and the violent event itself through "overt (e.g., petitions or demonstrations of public opinion) or covert (e.g., resistance) actions" (2005, 218). They also note that, in genocide, bystanders are excluded from the ethnic group perpetrators designate for destruction (217). Finally, bystanders might also benefit from annihilation of the victim group by acquiring property confiscated from victims.

Several researchers admit the term "bystanders" is problematic on a number of levels, but leave the remedy of this problem to future scholarship (Ehrenreich and Cole, 224).