Passive bystanders in front of violence and injustice: From inertia to change in social thinking

The complex issue of social justice will be discussed in this paper in a socio-constructionist perspective, with specific reference to the figure of "bystanders" and the passage from a condition of inertia to functions of pressure for social change. Bystanders, inert and passive onlookers of violence and injustice, even if they do not make directly destructive choices, represent however the major pivot of that silent or explicit consent, used by an unjust social system to assert its consistency.