Worcester News Column - WMRSASC CEO, Jocelyn Anderson
What starts as a frustrating moment in traffic — watching a fellow dog owner fail to pick up after their Labrador — leads to a bigger reflection on fairness, justice, and why the belief that “life is fair” can do more harm than good. In this piece, our CEO explores why we need to face uncomfortable truths about abuse, justice, and responsibility.
The other day, marooned in traffic and watching the world through my car window, I noticed a man, probably in his mid-50s, who was walking a huge golden Labrador.
They were moving slowly and along a path that I often take with my own dog, a path you have to tread carefully to avoid the hazards left behind by inconsiderate owners.
I watched as they stopped, the dog did its business and then, without a backwards glance, the man walked on.
I seethed at him through the window for giving dog owners a bad name.
The traffic moved forward and I briefly lost sight of him.
But then, in what I like to think of as a moment of instant karma, he reappeared from behind a tree, trying unsuccessfully to scrape something unpleasant from his shoes.
I want to believe in karma – I want to believe that bad actions have consequences and that the world, in the end, is fair and that good things happen to good people and bad things to bad people.
Psychologists call this the Just World Theory (Lerner, 1980), our tendency to believe life is basically fair even when the evidence around us says otherwise.
This belief helps us impose order on a chaotic, unsafe world.
It is why we cling to the idea that we can keep ourselves and our loved ones safe if we simply behave differently from those it befalls.
It leads to victim-blaming, asking a rape victim what they were wearing, how much they had been drinking or why they went to that party/house/office/school/meeting.
It is a way of reassuring ourselves that what happened to them could never happen to us as long as we make the ‘right’ choices.
But the reality is that bad things happen to good people all the time and that life is profoundly unfair.
Each year in England and Wales around 500,000 children are sexually abused.
One in four women, and one in 18 men, have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16.
But justice is rare – less than 15 per cent of rape survivors report to the police and fewer than three per cent of those reports lead to charges in the same year.
Those who do report face an average five-year wait for their case to be heard.
Something needs to change.
We must stop looking the other way and start calling it out because no one asks for or deserves to be raped or abused.
I want to believe karma catches up with perpetrators in this life and the next, I want them to face justice.
But in the meantime I guess I will have to settle for a belly laugh through the open window as a 50-something man steps in something he really should have picked up.
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