Violent people get violent

In the last few years a whole genre of videos has sprung up on YouTube of compilations of clips from people’s dashcams, or from the channel author’s own. Some of these channels (particularly the American-based ones) specialise in spectacular crashes or egregiously bad driving; the ones here in the UK seem to be full of merely irritating driving — people pulling out in front of the author at a junction where they should have given way, for example. One American channel titled “Idiots in Cars” mostly features crashes, but one episode featured, amid the wreckages from the American ‘stroads’, a tame British clip featuring a driver who had pulled out onto a road when he shouldn’t, and after a brief stand-off, pulled back in. One branch of it consists of people riding around on pushbikes trying to catch people using mobile phones at the wheel, sending the footage to the police then gloating that they got the driver fined or banned from driving. There are also driving instructors who have their own channels, in which they give advice on dealing with situations you might encounter while driving, but also sometimes offer commentary on clips sent in by viewers. Last week, the Liverpool driving instructor Ashley Neal posted a video in which a driver who had been driving impatiently, swerving left to overtake and then weaving between that car and another which got in his way, was stopped at a set of lights next to one of the two cars, whose driver got out and smashed his window. What was appalling was the nature of some of the comments.

The comments included things like “cammer f***ed around and found out”, “you reap what you sow”, “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” and “if you go about annoying people all day, guess what happens”. A few of the comments noted that there was “no excuse for the smashed window”, or called both parties idiots, but there was a general sense that the cammer had asked for it, got what he deserved or at least deserved no sympathy. The fact that this was a bit of quite unprovoked and uncalled-for violence by someone who must have been carrying something in his car to use for this purpose (a baton or a brick, maybe), which is illegal, did not seem to occur to anyone.

It actually is not natural or normal to respond to ‘disrespect’ or minor provocations or annoyances with violence. People who do this are people who have not been conditioned to control their temper and have got away with using violence in the past, often from childhood. Any normal driver would have just ignored the aggressive driver when they met him at the set of lights, or at most tooted their horn and called him an idiot; only someone accustomed to using violence would get out of their car and attack them. I remember this quite clearly when I was at school, where violence was an everyday occurrence: it was the boys used to being at the top of the pile who would attack others in response to insults, annoyances or ‘disrespect’ from someone else, especially someone beneath them in the bullyarchy. People who were not would at most scream and shout. I recall one incident where a boy came into a class, read out something that had been written on a desk in another classroom about one of the bigger boys in my class and his ex-girlfriend; another boy, amused by the sexualised language and swear words, sat at his desk giggling at what he had heard. The boy the graffito was about got up and attacked him in front of the teacher. We later heard that this boy had been ‘moody’ as a result of some medication he was on, and as far as I recall, he suffered no consequences or at least we heard nothing if he did.

I don’t know the history of the thug in the red Ford in Ashley Neal’s video, but I do know that what I saw not only did not justify any violence; only a thug would respond to someone pulling in front of them on a dual carriageway with a brick through their window. We are really too quick to ‘understand’ a bully and too quick to furnish them with excuses or blame their victims. I have even read of police officers telling a teenager, after being assaulted following a road accident, that “you can’t give ‘verbal’ and expect nothing in return” and then refusing to prosecute the man responsible. It is only violent people who behave like this and ordinary people have no duty to keep their mouths shut or tiptoe around them and their sense of entitlement.

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