What makes your wife think that they did not know what to do?
They knew perfectly well what to do, they were seeking a ‘group consensus’ before taking action.
In particular, they were making sure that the female chaperone in the room was going to support their action.
When I was chaperoning my daughters high school dances, the situation was reversed. A mom asked me and another dad to break up the grope session.
Unfortunately, breaking them up led to the second problem of the night. The young lad was too drunk to stand. The young lad spent most of the rest of the night in the men’s room hugging his favorite toilet !
Brilliant - they’re cowards, complete moral and I suspect physical cowards.