Inside Bungalow 3: the revelations raise uncomfortable questions about ourselves

Like many others, I have people in my life with high levels of vulnerability. So, for a week, I wimped out. I could not bear to watch the Prime Time Investigates programme, "Inside Bungalow 3", on the maltreatment of people with intellectual disabilities.

The programme was horrifying enough, but one was also aware that probably many others were being treated in the same way.

Yet for a brief minute at the beginning of the programme, we got a glimpse into a bungalow on the same campus, unit two in Bungalow 4, where a very different atmosphere seemed to exist, one of kindness and care. Even within the now notorious Bungalow 3, there were occasional moments when humanity prevailed.

It would have been good to spend more time inside Bungalow Four, to ask why are things going right here? What is the crucial difference between this bungalow and its neighbour? Both are subject to the same level of inspection and regulation. How come one was functioning better while in the other some staff treated residents like objects to be managed rather than human beings to be cherished? I don’t know, but I suspect the answer lies in leadership, and how the tone is set by key people.

It is easy to demonise the staff in Bungalow 3. The treatment of the residents there will take a long time to fade from our memories.But by demonising, we lose the opportunity to understand and to forge a different culture.

Emeritus professor of psychology Ervin Straub was a Jewish child who escaped the Holocaust through the actions of Raoul Wallenberg, who issued protection papers, but also those of the family maid, Macs, who took enormous risks to shelter them.

Altruism and cruelty

He went on to research what prompts people to acts of selfless altruism, and this eventually led to researching the opposite – what leads people to dehumanise others to the extent that they are willing to participate in genocidal actions?

People who do terrible things can be kind in other contextssuch as family or with friends. Straub believes that people learn by doing, and that seemingly small acts of wrongdoing that are not met with disapproval can change people, and make them more likely to commit far worse acts.

The role of disapproval

The bystander is crucial. As he says, “Active opposition by bystanders can re-activate the perpetrators’ moral values.”

In one key study, volunteers went in pairs into a room, supposedly to assess personality from written accounts. In fact, one of each pair was a plant, a collaborator with Straub.

Sounds of screams and crashes would come from an adjacent room. When the collaborator suggested it was probably nothing to do with them, only 25 per cent of people demurred and investigated. When the collaborator showed concern, every volunteer went to check what was happening.

Bystanders can both be people who are present, or a society that stands by until there is a scandal, then becomes briefly exercised, then drifts off again.

Straub also writes about the human tendency to scapegoat – to project all evil outwards, so that it does not implicate ourselves.

The capacity for wrongdoing lies within each of us. Simple things like working in a residential unit where there is a strong culture of care, versus working in one where the opposite is true, can cause us to act in ways that those closest to us would find surprising or even appalling.

The predictable social media storm broke out after the programme, with alleged death threats and targeting of relatives of the people who worked in Bungalow 3. How does that help, except to reinforce a sense of smug superiority in people who have such an irony deficit they cannot see that death threats and intimidation of relatives are also a violent, ugly response?

Contrast that with the forbearance of the relatives of Mary Garvan, a resident in Bungalow 3. They called for calm, for the opportunity for staff to tell their side of the story, and said their thoughts and prayers were with the suspended staff. They also said they believed in forgiveness as a way forward.

Forgiveness is not the same as condoning or excusing. If people need to face the courts, let it be so. But let us also not reach for simplistic answers.

No amount of regulation, or hidden cameras, will make people kind. However, studying the places where people act with empathy and concern is likely to reveal that there is a culture of care both for staff and residents, and strong personalities who almost unconsciously embody that care. People, in short, who are in touch with their humanity, including their own fallibility, and therefore are able to treat others with humanity too.