Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death within sight and sound of 38 neighbors. 1964: Kitty Genovese is stabbed to death near her apartment in New York City, while neighbors ignore her cries for help during three separate attacks lasting 35 minutes.
According to police, no fewer than 38 people heard — and possibly saw — at least one of the attacks by Genovese's knife-wielding assailant. Nobody came to her aid, and only one bothered calling the police — and only after the third attack had killed her.
This appalling display of collective indifference sparked sensationalized press coverage, horrified the nation, and prompted numerous psychological studies into what would become known as Genovese syndrome, or more generically, the bystander effect.
Witnesses interviewed subsequently gave two main excuses for doing nothing: fear and "not wanting to get involved." This caused a police captain to wonder why anyone would hesitate to pick up a phone and call for help from the safety of home.
The police maintained that had they been called after the first attack, Genovese would likely have survived her wounds. A squad car was on the scene within two minutes of when the call finally came in, so it seems reasonable to assume that the cops were right.
Catherine Genovese, 28, was chosen at random by her killer. He spotted her leaving her car at 3:50 a.m. as she returned home from her job as a bar manager.
The killer, 29-year-old Winston Moseley, confessed to the murder when he was picked up six days later. During questioning, Moseley confessed to two other murders as well, telling his interrogators that he had an "uncontrollable urge to kill." He selected women, he said, because they offered less resistance, making them easier to kill.
Since he also sexually assaulted his victims, including Genovese, it's clear Moseley selected women for other reasons, too. He was judged sane and sentenced to death, but the sentence was overturned on appeal and he received 20 years to life. Moseley remains an inmate at Great Meadow State Prison in upstate New York.
Whatever it was that caused so many witnesses to willfully ignore what was happening just outside their doors, the Genovese murder yielded numerous studies into the psychology of avoidance. One of the more famous studies, carried out by social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane, concluded that the larger the number of witnesses at the scene of an emergency or crime, the lower the probability that an individual will act.
They cited two main reasons:
- Pluralistic ignorance
Collective inaction by a large group encourages individuals within the group to accept that nothing is seriously amiss ("nobody else thinks it's serious"), even when his gut tells him otherwise. - Diffusion of responsibility
People have a tendency to avoid taking responsibility in critical situations, instead relying on another person to step up ("someone else is in charge" or "someone else is better able to deal with this"). The assumption that someone will do so becomes more pronounced in larger groups.
Subsequent studies have reached different conclusions, however, and over the years, the moral culpability of the do-nothing witnesses has also been disputed. Apologists argue, among other things, that no one was present for all three attacks and therefore no single person had a clear, overall picture of what was actually happening.
Twenty years after the fact, though, at least one witness remained unremorseful. Interviewed in 1984 by Newsday, Madeleine Hartmann, a native of France, said that she had become accustomed to hearing screams in the night in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens.
Besides, she added, "I'm not the police, and my English speaking is not perfect."
Source: Newsday, N.Y. Daily News, Wikipedia
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