This made me feel physically ill, imagining it happening to my wife or my sisters… I have never witnessed this kind of violent behavior personally, but if I’m being honest I don’t know how I would react.

I hope I would stand up and say something. I hope I would physically intervene, if necessary. I just don’t know though. But that’s part of the problem: this behavior is so foreign to most people, until it’s happening to them or in their midst. Most of us in the west fortunately or unfortunately are not mentally prepared for how to deal with this kind of situation. It’s so far outside of the normal human interactions, it is a jarring experience that makes us question what we’re seeing. Most people freeze up — perhaps as a primal survival mechanism. The predator is focused on someone else, so there’s no point in risking our own safety by drawing its attention to ourselves.

It goes without saying that none of this was your fault, as ridiculous as it might sound to claim the opposite — I know you may have feelings like you could or should have done something differently, but like any form of trauma, there’s no normal or correct way to deal with it. As far as anyone knows, what you did is probably the best possible thing you could have done!