There are two fiercely depressing elements to the story of Linda Buchanan, the woman pushed onto railway tracks last week in apparent retaliation for asking two youths to stop smoking in a no-smoking zone.

The first is the savagery of the youths’ reaction. Buchanan could have been electrocuted and is lucky to have survived. The second is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people will have reacted to that news by saying to themselves, “That’s it - no matter what I see going on around me, I’ll never dare speak out in public again.”

Buchanan’s case will have frightened people because she was an unusual victim in an unusual time and place. She wasn’t assaulted by drunks late at night, alone in a dark street. She was an unthreatening middle-aged woman, standing on a crowded commuter platform, catching a train to work in the morning. She must have felt safe.

It’s that conjunction of normality and sudden, unpredictable violence that is so unnerving and leaves people resolved to ignore whatever happens around them.

It’s an understandable reaction but it’s the wrong one. It’s precisely the mass retreat of adults from upholding public standards in public spaces, largely in the face of intimidation by the young, that has made the outside world such a scary place to be. Buchanan stood out because she was a lone voice. Had she been supported by a dozen people agreeing with her, or had a dozen people been likely to act together to catch the attackers, the chances of any assault would have been drastically reduced.

That kind of group confidence has largely disappeared in Britain. Instead there’s a general uncertainty about whether it’s legitimate to uphold civilised behaviour and a fear of the consequences if we speak or act. A substantial section of us now think that inconsiderate, disruptive or threatening behaviour isn’t the business of anyone but the police.

Nothing illustrates that more clearly than the reactions of readers on a local newspaper blog to Buchanan’s fate. Many, although sorry for what had happened, agreed that it was far too dangerous to challenge anyone, ever. Some condemned her for interfering. One man wrote: “What made her station master? She should have kept her gob shut, her opinions to herself, and reported them. Unless you are the law don’t try and uphold the law, hardly rocket science now, is it.” An indignant station master responded by saying he wouldn’t have done anything in the same situation - it wasn’t his responsibility: “It ain’t my job to confront lawbreakers of any description. Why should I put myself in a position of danger?”

The trouble with this attitude is that it’s so shortsighted. Individuals think they’re safer for not interfering, but if nobody will come to anyone else’s aid, being in public makes us both more anxious and far less safe, because we know that if we become an unlucky victim, we’ll be on our own.

As for the idea that every bit of bad behaviour should be referred to the police: it would be both insane and impractical. One in 10 of us would have to be employed as policemen and another one in 10 would have to run the courts. Communities don’t work like that. They need adults to set boundaries and to maintain them.

The interesting question is why adults feel so cowed and uncertain. It wasn’t the case a generation ago. Anyone over 45 will recognise that they grew up in a world where a sense of adult authority was taken for granted. It was necessary because then, as now, the majority of crime and aggressive behaviour was carried out by the young, and particularly by young men. The adult role was to socialise the next generation.

In my childhood any random adult could and did stop teenagers from being beaten up or scold us for storming onto a bus. A friend who was one of a group of wild teenagers on a council estate in the 1970s says their attempts at shoplifting, joyriding or fighting were constrained by grown-ups who shouted at them, frogmarched them out of trouble or reported them to their parents. Most of the troublemakers didn’t end up with criminal records because they were dealt with informally. The social pressure on them encouraged them to grow out of it.

That has all changed. Over the past couple of decades there has been a revolution in the way adults and children relate to one another. Well-intentioned initiatives, designed to protect children from being physically chastised at school or at home, or from being assaulted by paedophiles, have had the unintended consequence of snapping the wider social bonds between the generations.

Children are taught to fear everyone they don’t know and told that no stranger can touch them. Adults, fearful of being accused of paedophilia, avert their eyes when toddlers smile at them and dare not pick up a child if it falls from a swing. There is no general building of warmth or trust. Later, grown men are frightened to reprimand young girls, or to lay a hand on an aggressive boy, for fear of being accused of assault.

Children grow up in a cold vacuum of apparent mutual indifference, where they learn to ignore and be ignored by people around them. They find that they get no help from adults when they are scared or mugged, but nor are they stopped when they intimidate anyone else. They learn that they can feel powerful in public because everyone else is too scared to challenge them. It’s not surprising that a minority of such children grow up indifferent to others’ feelings and are outraged, sometimes to the point of violence, when asked to consider them. That’s the result of leaving them to act like Lords of the Flies.

There’s only one answer to this situation and that is for adults to reclaim their role. It needs courage from individuals but it requires commitment by governments, too. The legislative and social framework that deters people from engaging with children from their earliest years, from touching them or intervening in assaults, has to change.

The government are belatedly recognising the problem. Last month Jack Straw oversaw a law that gives new protection to those who act instinctively to protect themselves or others. Next they need to stop reinforcing the idea that every stranger is a danger and that adults and children shouldn’t interact. It’s no way to build a safer society.

Unless we want this spiral of anxiety and violence to continue, we have to recognise our mutual dependence and stop seeing one another as a threat.

Minette Marrin is away

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