Would you STOP?
- Dr Beth Mosley
- Aug 9
- 4 min read
Four teenage boys waved their arms in panic as I drove past the edge of a small wooded area. Instinctively, I stopped the car, reversed, and rolled down the window. The boys rushed to the front of the vehicle, hands on the bonnet, breathless.
“Don’t go! Please help us—our friend’s crashed his bike and hurt his leg badly. He’s bleeding out!”
I recognised one of them as my neighbour’s son. These were fourteen-year-olds—same school as my boy. I believed them. No hesitation.
I leapt out of the car, grabbed towels from the boot—it was all I had—and shouted to my daughter, “Find the hazards!” as I sprinted into the woods.
I heard the screaming before I saw him.
That scream—raw pain, fear—it told me this was real. No exaggeration. A shirtless boy in denim shorts lay on the ground, one friend holding his leg in the air. Blood soaked through the shorts.
“The bleeding won’t stop!” he cried. “I’m going to bleed out!”
He was trying to apply pressure, but it wasn’t working.
“We need a belt!” I shouted. My hands flew to my waist. I had one. Off it came. I knelt down, told him what I was doing, and fastened it tightly above the wound to form a tourniquet.
Thank goodness for my workplace mandatory life support training.
The bleeding slowed. He calmed. One boy was already on the phone to 999. I took over and explained the scene. They upgraded the call to the highest priority.
“Expect up to a forty-minute wait,” the call handler said. “Don’t move him. Keep the leg elevated.”
Around us, seven boys stood. Some hovered in the background, faces pale with panic. I talked calmly to them all, reassured them help was coming.
“Thank you for stopping,” they kept saying.
Only one car stopped. Mine.
The ambulance arrived about twenty minutes later. The boy was stabilised and taken to hospital.
Two days later, he was standing outside my house with all his friends, saying thank you.
Then one of them said something that stopped me cold.
“We tried to stop over fifty cars. You were the only one who stopped.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“They thought we were messing about,” one of them said. “Grown men flipped us off and told us to get out of the road.”
Another added, “It’s because we’re teenage boys. They were probably scared of us.”
He wore a white Nike T-shirt, floppy hair, tanned. There was nothing threatening about him. Nothing about any of them made me feel afraid. But maybe having sons and working with young people changes how I see boys.
“How does that make you feel?” I asked.
“Like we’re not to be trusted. Just troublemakers. But we were trying to do the right thing. We were scared he might die.”
They had done the right thing. They phoned 999. They looked after their friend. They flagged down help. They were brave, calm, resourceful—and ignored by almost every adult who passed them.
This incident left me with three big questions.
1. Why didn’t more people stop?
How are boys supposed to believe they’re valued if, even in their moment of desperate need, adults assume the worst?
Where is our community responsibility? What’s happened to the idea that we look out for one another—especially our young people?
2. Why aren’t we teaching life-saving skills in schools?
The injured boy’s mum is a nurse. He knew to elevate the leg and apply pressure. He’d even tried to make a tourniquet from his T-shirt, using a stick to tighten it. But panic, pain, and blood made it impossible for him to manage alone.
Afterward, the boys said, “We should be taught basic first aid in school.”
I agree. That night, I made my own son—thirteen and always on his bike—watch YouTube clips about emergency first aid. I also ordered a mini first aid kit for his backpack, alongside his bike tools.
It’s a simple step. But it could save a life.
3. Why don’t we teach kids about apps like ‘What3Words’?
The 999 call handler kept asking the boys for their “three words.” They had no idea what that meant. They kept trying to name the road they thought the woods were near.
We talked about it afterwards. I explained how the What3Words app can pinpoint your exact location to a 3x3 metre square—essential in rural emergencies. They all downloaded it. I showed my kids too. Now it’s active on my phone permanently.
One more thing the boys said shocked me.
They didn’t text their parents to tell them what had happened.
“We thought they’d panic and tell us to come home,” one said. “We needed to stay together in the woods. Talk about what happened. Make sense of it. So it didn’t feel so scary.”
That post-incident debrief—that moment of shared storytelling and emotional processing—was exactly what they needed. And they knew it. It helps prevent trauma. It helps them make meaning out of chaos.
But they didn’t feel adults would understand.
That broke my heart a little.
These boys were extraordinary: brave, respectful, emotionally intelligent. But they felt adults wouldn’t trust them, wouldn’t stop for them, wouldn’t listen to them—even when one of their friends might die.
So I ask again: Would you have stopped?
If not—why?
And if you did—what would make you hesitate?
Let’s not allow our own fear, assumptions, or biases stop us from helping when it matters most.
Let’s give our boys the credit—and support—they deserve.
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