Choosing to stay quiet when a friend gets picked on is still a choice they’ll remember.

Silence reads as a position, even when it is really fear. The person being got at is not counting who joined in so much as who was there and said nothing, and that tends to last, because being left alone in a room is its own injury. None of this makes you the one who did it.

You do not have to confront anybody to break it. Standing next to them, saying their name, changing the subject, or finding them afterwards all count. If you have stayed quiet before, you can still say something now.