Gelisim News

A person received harsh reactions by everyone after he recorded and shared the last moments of Emine Bulut who was stabbed to death in Kırıkkale by her ex-husband in front of the eyes of her 10-year-old daughter on social media. Psychiatrist Onur Okan Demirci gave information about how people can watch without interfering with such an event and how the recorded video will affect the psychology of the child who witnessed the traumatic situation.

Psychiatrist Demirci explained why people looked on instead of intervening and trying to help people:

“As a result of a number of social experiments, this situation was investigated and a theory was proposed, called “Bystander Effect (audience effect)”. According to this theory, the likelihood that people intervene in events is bound to two conditions. The first of these; as the number of people in that environment increases at the time of the incident, the sense of responsibility decreases and people only look on the event with the idea that someone will intervene anyway. As the number of people witnessing the event decreases, their sense of responsibility increases and the likelihood of people to intervene increases. The more crowded the environment, the less the sense of responsibility will decrease and the people will watch one other without interfering with the relaxed attitude of each other.”

Psychiatrist from Istanbul Gelisim University, Onur Okan Demirci pointed out that the sentence that people will say when they feel themselves in danger is very important.

Demirci said: “For example, if you are in danger of drowning on a beach with only a few people, there is a higher chance that someone will rescue you rather than on a crowded beach. If there is someone else in the scene at the time of the event, we are able to perform the image-taking behavior with a clearer conscience. The second factor that is effective in making an intervention decision is the seriousness of the situation. We try to understand the seriousness of the situation by monitoring it for a while before intervening. If it is serious, our chances of intervention will increase. In the recent sad incident, people might be hesitant to intervene because they considered the severity of the situation as a mere fight. At that moment, no one would have thought that someone would die. If there are few people in the environment at the time you feel in danger and you can reflect the situation seriously, you will be more likely to get help from the environment if you shout ‘help me they will kill me’ instead of ‘please help me’.

 
Expresing that the 10-year-old child exposed to the event can easily access these images throughout her life on the internet environment, Demirci completed his words as follows:

“These images need to be removed as soon as possible. If the images are not removed, it will pursue the child for the rest of her life. These images will interfere with the efforts of psychological support to the child. Imagine being reminded of the most painful event in your life for 7/24. How can you go back to live your life in such a situation, how can you continue where you left off? People watched videos in different psychologies and some of them still watch and share again and again. Some expressed their feelings of regret, some for empathy, some anger, some spilling out hatred against the killer. Such events give us ideas about what kind of psychological structure we have as a society. We see that a considerable number of people spill out incredible hatred and horror looking at the comments and shares. Our ability to tolerate and reason gets diminishing. We're not judging anymore; we terminate with extreme prejudice. What is even more grave is that a pathetic audience supports what happened. All these experiences and all this confusion will take place only in the mind of one person for a lifetime, of the little girl. We must be sensitive. Do not let the this image, comments and discussions carry to the future.”