On Wednesday night a six year old boy was tragically killed on the railway tracks at Corio in Victoria. Little Kieran had wandered from home and onto the railway tracks where the oncoming train could do nothing to spare the small boy once he was spotted on the tracks.
It is a horrific and tragic story and the loss to Kieran’s family (and the impact on the train driver) is almost unfathomable. But there is more than one tragedy to this story. The tragedy of a society that fails to step in when they see someone in trouble.
Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point talks about the “bystander problem”. He writes:
“One of the most infamous incidents in New York city history … was the 1964 stabbing death of a young Queens woman by the name of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was chased by her assailant and attacked three times on the street, over the course of half an hour, as thirty-eight of her neighbours watched from their windows. During that time, however, none of the thirty-eight witnesses called the police.”
At first this horrific case was explained away as being the result of he dehumanising effect of urban life, the fact that the anonymity and alienation of city life makes people hard and unfeeling. But two New York City psychologists subsequently conducted a series of studies to undrestand what they called the “bystander problem”. Gladwell writes:
“In one experiment for example Latane and Darley had a student alone in a room stagee an epileptic fit. When there was just one person next door, listening, that person rushed to the student’s aid 85 percent of the time. But when subjects through that there were four others also hearing the seizure, they came to the student’s aid only 31 percent of the time.
In the case of Kitty Genovese, then… the lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream.
Do you you subscribe to the bystander theory or are we just not responding to the people in need ? Have we become hard and dehumanised when we don’t report small children wandering the streets in the traffic or have we just given up caring?
Top Comments
About 25 years ago, when she was 17, my sister was out with a friend drinking. She left the bar to walk a couple of blocks along the street to the service station to buy cigarettes and on the way she was physically picked up (screaming her head off) and taken into an alleyway by 3 men and raped and then pissed on by them all. Screaming all the time and she said that just outside the alley itself there was heaps of people standing around, smoking chatting etc. She came out crying and dishevelled and nobody did anything. I will never understand those people and it makes me so angry and sad.
I've experienced both sides of the coin...
1. My friends and I were walking back to our car one night, when I heard a man yelling and being physically aggressive towards a woman. I'd heard him yell her name, so I walked over to her and asked her (by name) if she was ok and did she want to come with us? She accepted and we walked her to the police station. She'd obviously been in the situation before coz she said that the police couldn't do anything or take her statement coz she had been drinking.
We left her with the police and I have no idea what happened to her after that...
2. A friend of mine got mugged by a bunch of young girls, on a (still fairly busy) main road, at around 2am. My friend screamed and yelled and tried flagging down cars, even taxis. But no-one stopped. NOT EVEN A TAXI! I understand that the motorists might've thought it was a set-up, but surely a taxi could've radioed the situation into their base before stopping?!!!
Eventually an elderly man in a nearby house came out to help her. God bless him.