Perpetrators, victims, and bystanders

The typology was first proposed by Raul Hilberg in the 1992 book Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945.

[2][3] Anthropologist Alexander Hinton credits work on this theory with sparking widespread public intolerance of mass violence, calling it a "proliferation of a post-cold war human rights regime that demanded action in response to atrocity and accountability for culprits.".

[8] Even with this added complexity, most genocide research focuses on perpetrators, in part because evidence of their behavior is most accessible to scholars.

[3] The template of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders is also being applied to cyberbullying and sexual assault on college campuses.

Robert M. Ehrenreich and Tim Cole add to earlier scholarship from Raul Hilberg with their specific "prerequisites" for applying the perpetrator-victim-bystander triad.

They go on to explain that victims' options are directly proportional to how rapidly the perpetrators are able to advance their acts of violence.

Giorgia Donà explains the bystander category in her 2018 research about the Rwandan Genocide as people who "neither partake in the act of violence nor flee from it.

Furthermore, their bystander behavior may be influenced by the relative danger or safety of shifting to perpetrator or victim roles.

Ottoman soldiers (perpetrators) june Armenian civilians (victims) through Harput (Kharpert) to a prison in nearby Mezireh ( Elazığ ), April 1915, during the Armenian genocide . [ 1 ] Bystanders can also be seen in the photograph.
In this photograph showing the deportation of Jews from Kitzingen , Jewish victims are shown with local non-Jewish bystanders and policemen (perpetrators).