Who attacks Who

First of all, thanks to J.K.Rowling to creating the world of Harry Potter, and for the various copyright owners and so on for allowing free discussion, quoting, and elaboration of this world. I make no claim of ownership on anything here and would be happy for others to use this data as a basis of their own theories and analyses of the Potterverse.

This analysis expands on one posted to alt.fan.harry-potter on 2th September 2005. In the mean time Karnak17@cs.com and dicconf@radix.net (Richard Eney) have been good enough to post details of attacks I missed and comments. Thanks very much to them, and I will continue to include attacks I have missed, although I reserve the right to decide which attacks fall within my the limits I have set myself, and to interpret those myself - and a lot of this is a matter of individual judgement.

Attacks I am interested in

The original purpose of gathering this information was to examine dispassionately the record of the main heroes of the story (Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley), contrasting them with their main enemy within their age group, Draco Malfoy. Argus Filch keeps a copy of the punishments and misdemeaners of Hogwarts students (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I will refer to as HBP, chapter "Sectumsempra", also Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets/CoS chapter "The Deathday party"). Would such a list show Harry Potter as hero or bully?

For this purpose I have considered only physical and magical attacks off the main story thread of Harry vs Voldemort (so e.g. Harry Potter vs Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone/PS chapter "The Man with Two Faces" doesn't count). I have not accepted insults as sufficient provocation, however foul. In this I am in line with Professor McGonagall's comments after the "Muggle dueling" incident in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix/OTP, chapter "The Lion and the Serpent". This affects the results of the analysis greatly, as many attacks are a response to verbal provocation by Draco Malfoy. In this he could be seen as incorrigably nasty, or a satirist persecuted by thugs who cannot match his wit. I have considered theft as equivalent, for my purposes, to an attack.

Some other situations I have ignored as so confused and morally grey to be 'unscoreable' - this includes most Quidditch-related incidents, the actions of the Inquisitorial Squad in OTP, and the abortive duelling club in CoS, chapter "The Dueling Club". Also to make things more objective (if possibly less useful) I have typically 'scored' the malefactor as the person or persons to launch the first blow or spell, regardless of the later progress of the incident. I have reported, but not scored, a lot of slapstick to do with the Dursley family which is confined to the first few chapters of the first book.

Table of Attacks

The following table is a brief list of attacks in order within the books in which we hear about them. Spanning lines in header format give the title of the book, minus the starting words "Harry Potter and the". Spanning lines in normal format give the chapter title in which succeeding attacks are reported (so you can look them up and decide for yourself).

Attacks by book

As the main characters grow up, they become more and more dangerous opponents. Ron predicts this in PS "The midnight duel": "but people only die in proper duels, you know, with real wizards. The most you and Malfoy'll be able to do is to send sparks at each other. Neither of you knows enough magic to do any real damage". This effect can also be seen in the table: the first scored incident is Goyles attempt to steal food from Ron, which is foiled by Ron's pet, Scabbers, and the last is an escalating confrontation between Malfoy and Harry, which ends when Harry nearly kills Malfoy, who is just about to use an unforgivable curse on Harry. On Harry's side, this isn't quite as bad as it sounds. All he knew of "Sectumsempra" was that it was described as "for enemies" (this is shown earlier in the same chapter), and his his previous spells in that incident were the leg-locker curse (first year) and Levicorpus (from the Half-Blood Prince but amusing by Hogwarts school standards).

Anyway, as the characters grow up, and attacks produce more serious consequences, I expected them to grow less frequent, but this isn't what happens: here is a table and a graph of number of attacks by book (note the bad influence of the Half Blood Prince: four of the ten attacks in HBP are from his potions book. (The graphs here are from the statistical package Minitab).

Attacks by Character

Heroes and Villains

I have drawn a line from (0,0) to (9,9) on the graph to show the positions of someone who initiates as many attacks as they receive, although the of attacks initiated (46) is not the same as the number of attacks received (38) because I score 1 point to each initiator and one point to each recipient in the case of multiple initiators and recipients, so initiators and recipients don't balance.

The graph is obscured a little by overwriting, but the only important obscuration is at (4,0): this dubious location is shared by both Hermione and Fred, while George is at (5,0). I think Hermione's position here is a feature of our culture today: an attack by a male on a female is considered a great wrong, but an attack by a female on a male is considered amusing, if not indeed praiseworthy. If I had scored the abortive dueling club, and the over-zealous actions of the inquisitorial squad, Hermione would be down as having received two attacks, but both of these would be by (the same) female, Millicent Bulstrode. Ginny did indeed receive an attack from Ron, but this seems to have been a special case: not only was this a family quarrel, but the attack is borderline: thanks to Harry, and to Ron's poor aim, Ginny did not actually receive any physical or magical blows. Fred and George's attacks are in response to Malfoy's words, except for two incidents: their attack on Montague when he attempted to take points from Gryffindor, and the bombarding of their brother, Percy, with mashed parsnips.

The Montague case is potentially quite serious, as Fred and George display total unconcern about the effects of their actions (partly because, with Dumbledore gone, their only goal in remaining at school is to cause as much trouble as possible) and Montague is still confused in chapter "Grawp". Here Hermione suggests that they tell Madame Pomfrey what happened to him. By then Fred and George have departed, so this would not rebound on them. Ron argues against this: he thinks Montague will eventually recover regardless, but admits not to caring either way. If Fred and George are going to be charged with the full effect of their actions (rather than just recklessness) then Ron must be complicit, unless he had grounds for knowing that Montague would in fact recover (brought up amongst Wizards and Weasleys, he is likely to have a reasonably full knowledge of the effects of magical horseplay). We know from HBP: "The Lightning-Struck Tower" that Montague did in fact recover. I have scored this as just another attack, by Fred and George.

Personally, I am more worried about the Mother in the case of the parsnip incident: the mashing of parsnips is an act of completely unwarranted vandalism perpetrated on a noble vegetable, which should of course be roasted, or, at worst, boiled as close to whole as is practical :-).

Neville clearly deserves our sympathy, as the recipient of five attacks, while initiating none of them. All five attacks occur in PS, when Neville is especially lacking in confidence. Four of them are outright bullying from Malfoy, and the fifth is Hermione's full Body-Bind, as the trio set out to protect the Philosopher's stone from Voldemort. He does attempt to attack Malfoy in OTP, in the presence of Crabbe and Goyle, so Harry stops him lest he get torn apart by them, and I haven't scored this to anybody at all.

That leaves us with Harry and (Draco) Malfoy, who both seem to be in the thick of things. Malfoy is further from Crabbe and Goyle than Harry is from Ron and Hermione: Crabbe and Goyle don't seem to have the initiative required for much more than standing around looking intimidating. On the graph, Malfoy looks nearly as put-upon as Neville, but is this just circumstance? A lot of the assumptions relied upon by statistics don't hold here (such as random sampling, and independence of successive samples) but we might use them as a rough judge of evidence all the same. By this light, there is nothing very striking about the Malfoy-Harry disparity, but if we pool the results for the two trios, we get the following table:

Fisher's exact test tells me that, if this table was generated by some perfectly random process (such as tossing coins 27 times for the top line and 28 lines for the bottom, and then trying again if the total number of attacks initiated was not 31) the probability that the trio of Harry, Hermione, and Ron would have initiated 19 or more of the attacks would be only about 0.037. If you didn't have a prior reason to suspect that Harry and friends would be aggressors rather than aggressed you should probably correct this by multiplying it by two to get 0.074, which is greater than the lower of the two conventional thresholds for statistical significance, 0.05, so this is by no means strong evidence.

The Wit and Wisdom of Draco Malfoy

Do I really consider Draco Malfoy a satirist, even a court jester, continually harrassed by thugs who can only express themselves with their fists and wands? I will not condone violence whose only excuse is verbal provocation, so I will cheat by simply presenting you with a selection of quotes from Draco preceding these events:

.. Hoping to be gamekeeper yourself when you leave Hogwarts, I suppose - that hut of Hagrid's must seem like a palace compared to what your family's used to.

You're in luck, Weasley, Potter's obviously spotted some money on the ground!

No one asked your opinion, you filthy little Mudblood!

Suppose you'd love to live here, wouldn't you, Weasley? Dreaming about having your own bedroom? I heard your family all sleep in one room - is that true?

Have you ever seen anything quite as pathetic? And he's supposed to be our teacher!

But don't touch my hand now. I've just washed it, you see, don't want a Mudblood sliming it up.

... Too late now, Potter! They'll be the first to go, now the Dark Lord's back! Mudbloods and Muggle-lovers first! Well - second - Diggory was the f-'