Not All Villains Wear Ski Masks

It’s not just that witnesses don’t help the victims of wrongdoing. Often, they help the wrongdoers.

A content note for misogynistic, obstetric, and other forms of violence.

Last week, I wrote about a contrast between two traumas: a kidnapping, where everyone helped, and a medical rape, where nobody did. In the first case, Jack Teich was kidnapped by two bad guys wielding guns and wearing ski masks; but the FBI, the police, and most importantly, his own family, rallied around him to save him. In the second case, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the prolific profiler and novelist, was medically raped during childbirth, only to have her husband “freeze” and the nurse who had previously cared for her pretend not to know her.

It’s more than that, actually: the nurse helped the doctor violating her. The nurse procured the hook to break Brodesser-Akner’s water after the doctor had stripped her cervical membranes: all without her consent, while she was screaming in pain for him to stop. (Brodesser-Akner ended up with an emergency C section anyway—and severe PTSD, which is partly predicted by being unhelped and invalidated by third parties, as I’ve written.)

I want to focus on the character of the nurse here not because she is anomalous. On the contrary, psychological research suggests that what she did—helping the wrong person—is distressingly common under certain conditions. Namely, when the wrongdoer is wearing a doctor’s white coat—or a lab coat. In other words, when a wrongdoer comes wearing the trappings of authority many people will not challenge them. In fact, they will do their bidding.