“The greatest tragedy is not always the harm inflicted but the silence that surrounded it.”
Martin Luther King Jr. once warned: “The silence of the good people is more dangerous than the brutality of the bad people.” Taken at a political, societal, or deeply personal level, it remains a stark reminder that a victim’s reality and recovery is often scarred not only by those who perpetrated harm, but by those who stood by and watched, rationalised, or simply looked away. They watched as torture, injustice, lies, physical and/or emotional abuse, harassment was inflicted: consistent, relentless, merciless.
The stranger passes you on the street, coat collar pulled up against the biting wind. The woman next to you on the bus sighs whilst lifting her grocery bags. The colleague tapping away at their keyboard next to you, seemingly absorbed in the letters dancing across the screen. We pass these people every day and yet, we do not know what stories, burdens, shadows they carry, unseen, unheard and unacknowledged by the rest of us.
Elsewhere in the night, they run after her, silent and swift, dark shadows reaching out with a grip so fierce, it takes her breath away. The stranger jolts in her sleep, her dreams and reality achingly one as she oscillates between the desire to wake up and face reality or dance with the demons marking her night terrors. This is her reality, her lived and breathed experience, her testimony to survival.
A victim’s reality does not conclude at the end of a trial, judgement, or process even if the outcome appears to find in their favour. The trial sometimes continues long after the legal file or process has been closed, boxed, and shelved in the archive and it becomes nothing but a fading memory for others. The system may move on resplendent and arrogant in its perceived dispensation of justice if ever served, even where there were countless officials, officers, people working tirelessly and relentlessly in their quest for a just outcome. In contrast, irrespective of the world around them, the victim’s reality is tainted by memories that refuse to fade. Their memories remain vivid long after the world grows impatient with their pain. They oscillate between these moments of extreme strength and the crushing, harrowing weight of recollection. Healing is not a straight line, a pre-determined path, it is a labyrinth of unknowns interspersed with light and darkness. Justice if ever served whether it be formal or informal does not always guarantee recovery because of the great tragedy no one wants to acknowledge.
The greatest tragedy is not always the harm inflicted but the silence that surrounded it. It is the friends and family who chose neutrality, the neighbours who hid behind twitching curtains, the bystanders who convinced themselves it was not their fight, the institutions that calculated that action would come at too high a cost, or the colleagues who glanced away. This is the real tragedy for the victim not just the injustice, pain, physical or emotional torture that was suffered. The real tragedy is when you looked away. When you chose to stay silent or neutral whether through choice, coercion, or cowardice and that silence becomes complicity. This is the precise moment where the victim reels from the shattering realisation that nothing will ever be the same again. Something inside the victim shifts, changes, and becomes its own burden to carry. That burden is realisation.
We often debate who counts as a victim and how do you define the concept, as if victimhood can be neatly defined by legislation, verdict, or public consensus. The truth however uncomfortable it may be is that a victim is not created nor erased by a process because sometimes the process is inherently flawed or in its quest for objectivity fails to deliver a verdict that is fair, and equitable. A victim is defined by lived experience, by the harm endured and the aftermath survived, not the verdict delivered. Reality is that recovery requires more than the language of legal or procedural closure; recovery is not measured in case numbers, court, or procedural dates. A victim often walks away with more taken from them than the act of harm itself. Dignity may be stripped, but so are friendships, relationships, the ability to trust or the infallible belief that the world is safe or fair. It requires us to face uncomfortable truths and assertions and have the courage to acknowledge, empathise, and demand accountability including from those who were once silent witnesses.
If justice systems and defined processes falter, if communities look on from the parameters, if individuals look away in fear, indifference, or a desire for self-preservation, then at the very least as a society at every level from governments, justice institutions, organisations and companies, we owe victims a path forward. We owe them signposting to organisations, advocates, and services still committed, and equipped to support them. This support is needed long after the courtroom lights dim, and society’s attention moves on. Helplines, organisations, advocacy groups, safeguarding leads, or local support services can all provide practical, and logistical guidance where it is most needed. For it is important to remember that trauma does not respect the passage of time, it does not neatly conclude with a verdict that is delivered. Recovery becomes victims rebuilding themselves slowly, painfully, and quietly. Rebuilding also includes the reality around them, of frayed relationships, broken trust, empty promises, and abandonment. Irrespective of whether the case concluded in the victim’s favour, they live in the aftermath, constantly navigating the labyrinth where memories, judgements, expectations, fear and the will to continue clash and collide.
Signposting to support even if quietly, without fanfare or anonymously, can become a meaningful action when direct intervention is too frightening or seems fraught with risk. However, governments, institutions and organisations must implement genuine and robust mechanisms that facilitate this as opposed to elevating superficial means that simply serve to satisfy legislative or procedural requirements that do not protect against reprisal, condemnation or ostracization.
On an individual, personal level rarely can we undo what happened but, we can put the human back in humanity. Silence, avoidance and ostracization isolates victims further, it exacerbates harm that is already tangible and heavy. Even if we cannot intervene directly, we can at least acknowledge, support, or signpost victims to help, this becomes an achievable countermeasure to silence. An act of courage becomes signposting to organisations that provide a glimmer of hope, of light in the labyrinth of healing. If the initial silence or inaction was destructive, any gesture that breaks this however quietly and unobtrusively, can become a thread which when entwined with others can become a fragile web of support.
Compassion in the form of tangible and meaningful signposting costs little but choice, courage and moral clarity. We can look towards a stranger and smile. They may smile back, yet they may not. Truth be known it does not matter because your smile may just be enough to help them move forward another day. In our quest for self-preservation, we risk silencing the pain, suffering and recovery of someone. That someone could be you. It could be me. It could be anyone.
