Physical abuse is a very delicate subject and it tragically happens all too often. Most of those cases occur in private places where the public can’t see it, but an Italian YouTube channel wanted to create a social experiment and see how people would react to seeing a woman getting beat up by a larger man.
Even though most people would claim that they would always help a stranger in need, the captured footage certainly proves otherwise for most people who passed by.
The YouTube channel normally creates scary prank videos and the creators weren’t sure how people would react to this social experiment. At the beginning of the video, it states that 1 in 4 women will be a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime, and the case is even worse in the United States according to statistics of The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
On average, twenty people per minute are physically abused, which amounts to roughly 10 million cases per year.
A fourth of all men is a victim of physical abuse and the same counts for over a third of all women in the US.
“In this social experiment, we take a look at how people react when they witness violence against women. Do they stop? Do they carry on and ignore the violence?”
The creators of Italian YouTube channel installed a hidden camera in a local park, and two actors tried their best to create physical tension right in front of the camera and in the eye of the public.
Everything was set up at a rather busy walking path and twenty people in total passed by during filming. The abuse gradually escalated as the man started with pushes and shoves, but he also held the woman in a chokehold and started hitting her to aggravate the situation.
Their experiment was simple: see how many people would react to this clear case of physical abuse.
Unfortunately, of the twenty people who walked by the scene, only four of those tried to intervene. Everyone else just walked or ran away as if nothing was going on at all. Some of the kind strangers intervened calmly, which was enough to resolve this fake situation.
Two of the strangers decided to take a more direct approach, as they physically grabbed the man to stop him from hurting the woman instantly. The actor quickly had to tell the two brave men that everything was a set-up before he got hurt himself and pointed to the hidden camera covered in the bushes.
It’s a shame to see that the majority of the people here simply chose to ignore this clear case of abuse, but the man praised the actions of the four people who intervened. The social experiment quickly went viral with over 18 million views and definitely is a shocking eye-opener.
What would you do in a situation like this?
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