At about 3 o’clock one morning in the early spring of 1964, Kitty Genovese, 28, arrived home from the bar in New York City where she worked, as she did morning after morning. While she walked in darkness from the lot where she’d parked her car, an assailant attacked her, drove away and then returned to assault her some more. Genovese repeatedly screamed for help. Several neighbours reported hearing her but, as the story goes, no one answered her calls. The assailant left her eventually to die.
The New York Times gave the incident routine coverage: Genovese was one more victim of brutal assault on the streets of the city. But a couple of weeks later, the story made front-page news. There were no new facts or startling discoveries; what was new was the reframing of the story: where were the neighbours? How could they so heartlessly ignore the victim’s cries for help? What was just another violent crime turned into a sensational murder case. Genovese became a household name associated with what grew into a controversial story about bystanders and their complicit silence. The residents of the Mowbray, an apartment complex in Queens across the street from the crime scene, were in the unenviable position of having to defend themselves from international criticism. They asserted that it was, after all, three in the morning and they were asleep – moreover, with windows shut tight against the outside cold. Some claimed that, even if they’d called the police, they wouldn’t have responded to yet another street crime.
Bystander incrimination has taken root. Over time, bystanders were called out for summary condemnation. The activist Abbie Hoffman remarked: ‘And so you ask, “What about innocent bystanders?” But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent.’ The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, also writing in the 1960s, made the point by referring to the requirements of civil conduct: our ‘vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow [citizens].’
The alleged responsibilities of bystanders acquired such moral force that critics have pushed back. Victoria Barnett, author of Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (1999), asked: ‘What lies beneath the surface [of silence]?’ suggesting that fear or perpetrator allegiance explains the reticence of onlookers. Henrik Edgren, another scholar who has written about bystanders, posits assertions that are similarly exculpatory, explaining that bystanders are often coerced from interfering in harmful acts. Offering canonic justification for bystander inertia, the evidence-based theory of the bystander effect proposed in 1968 by the social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané argued that onlookers fail to intervene when they believe that others will.
The presumption of bystanders’ responsibility has, however, crystallised into the predominant opinion. Good Samaritan laws ratify intervention and protect ‘upstanders’ from liability. Bystander intervention is now axiomatic, a paragon of civic behaviour. Consider, by contrast, an image from the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 in Oklahoma: men and women blithely go about their business while the city within view burns. Images of lynchings are also revealing: onlookers, hardly indifferent, are downright jubilant. Nazi authorities made a point of including onlookers in their documentation of persecution. Edgren is no doubt right about the risks of intervention, but it is just as likely that German onlookers felt lucky to be on the right side of history or were even impressed with the clarity that the Nazis achieved about who belonged to the new Germany and who didn’t. Other images from the Nazi period confirm that looking on was acceptable behaviour, if not a joyful experience, often serving to bind observers into a community of privileged insiders. Images of Kristallnacht, for example, show spectators gazing inertly at a burning synagogue and urban passers-by oblivious to the effects of racially inspired vandalism.
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posted by f.sheikh
