In Photo: An old man tumbled on the rainy slippery ground in Hezhou, South China's Guangxi province, on March 26, 2015. No one dared to help him. Eventually the police came up and helped him to his feet.
In recent years, it is frequently seen in China that those who help tumbled elderlies are in turn blackmailed as offenders, or that those who knock over passers-by feign as helpers. In fact, in both uncanny plot twists, truth can be revealed through various ways. With surveillance cameras everywhere, nine out of ten such incidents have been re-presented through video clips. In the 21 cases since 2014, CCTV cameras or witness testimony have helped discover what really happened in 20 of them. China sees 149 controversial incidents about helping the tumbled pedestrians in first 10 months of 2015. Among them, 32 involve feigning helper, and 84 involve feigning injury.
This is extremely significant to root out similar incidents. Any hope of fluke should have been eradicated by the fact that truth is much more often than not found out.
However, once truth is discovered, the reinforcement of law is far from powerful enough. In the 84 cases where the seniors feigned injuries, only one senior has been detained— and even this punishment, according to law, has been lifted due to the fact that the offender is over 70 years old. In the 32 cases involving feigned helpers, the punishment was for they knocked over the pedestrians rather than feign to be helpers. In general, the law has punished basically none of the said offenders for their fraudulent acts.
But the law should. And this is the key to solving the problem. In cases where evidence is undeniably valid, the law should impose heavier penalty on those who feign injury to frame a helper; as for those who knock over someone but pretend to be helping the tumbled, besides the penalty of knocking over someone, there should be punishment on the uncanny pretension alone. When morality is not sufficient for regulating behavior, severe law should step in and help correct social cognition.
(The author is a Professor in Office of Social Science Administration, Shenzhen University. The article was translated from《恩将仇报或冒充好人都应受到法律处罚》on People’s Daily, October 16, 2015.)
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