Bihar Dalit Girl’s Death: Why We Mourn Some Victims and Ignore Others

Confronting the Blind Spots in Our Empathy

June 3, 2025

Why don’t we often feel moved, angry or responsible when we read about tragedies in the news? The recent death of a 10-year-old Dalit girl from Bihar, raped and left in critical condition in an ambulance, may have saddened us for a moment, but not enough to make us act—not even to express outrage online. But this wasn’t the case after the 2012 Nirbhaya Delhi gang rape. Let’s turn to psychology to understand what makes us pick and choose whose suffering we mourn.

Part of the answer lies in a basic but powerful concept in social psychology: identification.

‘In-Group’

We feel more empathy for people we see as similar to ourselves. The term “in-group” refers to those we relate to—people who share our class, language, lifestyle or dreams. The “out-group” are those we perceive as different.

Many middle-class Indians could picture themselves in the place of the Nirbhaya victim. A young woman taking a bus home after watching a film. She was educated, urban, not from a visibly marginalised caste or minority community. Her life resembled the hopes and everyday experiences of the middle class. Her suffering felt like a threat to “people like us.” The horror was close, personal and deeply unsettling.

But the girl in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur? A Dalit child, already carrying the burden of centuries of exclusion and oppression. The girl died at Patna Medical College Hospital (PMCH) on the morning of June 1, amid allegations that she was kept waiting in an ambulance for several hours before being admitted, as reported by Hindustan Times. But for many urban Indians, her life is distant. Her world, invisible. Even in death, she is kept outside the boundary of concern.

Empathy Blind Spots

We shouldn’t label ourselves or others as heartless—but we do need to recognise that our empathy may have blind spots. We like to believe we’re fair and compassionate, but our emotional reactions are often shaped by how far the victim’s life feels from our own. When someone’s world looks nothing like ours, it becomes harder for our minds to register their pain.

This is why filmmakers humanise the hero – showing their daily life, relationships, small joys and flaws – before letting them suffer, because without that connection, the audience won’t care what happens next. The suffering moves us only after we’ve come to know the character as someone like us. In other words, the pain feels real only when the person feels real.

Another reason for our selective empathy is “compassion collapse,” a psychological effect where people feel less empathy as the number of victims grows or when the suffering feels too distant or unfamiliar. Journalists are not immune to this either. A study by Media Action Against Rape (MAAR) found that Indian newspapers gave more coverage to rape cases in urban areas (49%) than in rural ones (22%)—a gap that likely reflects which stories are seen as more relatable or relevant, as reported by The News Minute in 2021.

Internationally, some of us may struggle to empathise with certain civilian war victims. For instance, hearing that 100 people—including women and children—were killed in a bombing would normally shock us. But if we're told this happened in Palestine, the reaction might be more muted. That’s often because we know Palestine only through the lens of the Israel-Palestine conflict, with little sense of who its people are—how they live, what they eat, how they sing, dance or celebrate. At times, our responses may subconsciously assume that those living in prolonged conflict are somehow less human, or at least less like us.

Coming back to the tragic incident in Bihar—because the child’s death is tied to caste, poverty or rural neglect, forms of systemic suffering—we often fall into the false belief that Dalits, or even economically poor people in Bihar, are somehow more used to pain, that they hurt less. This assumption can make us feel simply indifferent.

The other force at play is social mirroring. People tend to react to what others are reacting to. If your friends and influencers on social media are posting about an incident, you’re more likely to care. If no one is talking about it, you assume it’s not important or not your concern. This creates a loop. A silence becomes contagious. The algorithm rewards what is already visible, not what is urgent. In a digital age, injustice competes for attention, and the stories of the voiceless often lose.

We also need to talk about discomfort. Confronting caste violence means accepting that our society is not just flawed but rigged—that the child in Bihar was left in an ambulance not only because of mismanagement, but because her body belonged to a caste still not seen as equal. It also means admitting, “I haven’t done enough to publicly call it out.” These are difficult truths, and many people subconsciously choose to look away rather than question their own part in it. It’s easier to feel angry at strangers than to examine our own prejudices.

Widening the Circle

But are we capable of widening the circle of our empathy? Yes, if we make a “conscious effort” to care about those whose lives don’t resemble ours. The “expanding circle” theory by philosopher Peter Singer suggests that humans are capable of extending moral concern beyond immediate kin or in-groups to larger and more distant groups, but doing so often requires deliberate awareness and effort.

Psychologist C. Daniel Batson proposed the “perspective-taking” approach. In a series of experiments, Batson found that when participants were asked to “imagine” the feelings and experiences of someone suffering—especially someone from a different background—they reported more empathetic concern and were more likely to help.

Psychologists have also shown that the brain responds more strongly to the suffering of a single identifiable person than to numbers or abstract injustice. That’s why even within injustice, storytelling matters—and this is something journalists and civil society need to take seriously.

Neuroscientific research has found that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a region of the brain associated with empathy and perspective-taking, shows greater activation when participants are exposed to stories about a single individual compared to stories about multiple individuals.

Lastly, what do we do if we do feel empathetic? We must remember that silence is not neutral. Choosing not to speak, not to post, not to care—that too is a statement. And when that silence is repeated across millions, it becomes part of the machinery that keeps injustice running smoothly. So the simplest thing we can do is speak—at least on social media. Say something, gently but firmly. Push back when needed. Challenge the perspective of fellow citizens, even if just a little.

The girl from Bihar will not get back the years she was robbed of. But the least we can do is admit to ourselves why her death passed so quietly through our timelines. And then, maybe, begin to speak where we once stayed silent.

You have just read a News Briefing by Newsreel Asia, written to cut through the noise and present a single story for the day that matters to you. Certain briefings, based on media reports, seek to keep readers informed about events across India, others offer a perspective rooted in humanitarian concerns and some provide our own exclusive reporting. We encourage you to read the News Briefing each day. Our objective is to help you become not just an informed citizen, but an engaged and responsible one.