Kitty Genovese was 28. On the way home from work, a man approached her and stabbed her several times in the back. Then he sexually assaulted her and stole $49. According to the New York Times, it was the dawn of March 13. 1964, and 38 neighbors heard your screams for half an hour? But no one has done anything.
However, the tone of the facts goes far beyond that, as the scene is full of details and nooks and crannies where we enter the darker side of the human being, they say that a man came to open the window trying to scare the attacker by screaming. “Leave this girl alone. ” At that moment, the attacker, Winston Moseley, walked away from her for a few minutes and Kitty managed to get seriously injured and entered through the entrance of a building.
“The world is not threatened by the wrong people, but by those who allow violence. “Albert Einstein.
Nobody helped. Those who saw all this thought that perhaps nothing had happened, it was not so bad, however, Moseley found it to assault her once more and end her life. A few days later, the entire New York society held its breath when the New York Times The York Times published a series of long articles, accurately describing without anesthesia that apathy, silence, and inhumanity that, like a heartless being, ran through this city. Asleep.
The narrative symbolism of these publications was a psychological autopsy of a society that evades its responsibilities, decides not to act, look away and take refuge in the intimacy of its personal universe, ignoring any cry, any request for help.
Kitty Genovese’s case changed many ideologies and brought new formulations to the field of psychology. Let’s think about it.
Winston Moseley was an African-American, engineer by profession, married and father of three. When he was arrested after a robbery, he was quick to confess to the murder of Kitty Genovese and two other young men. Necrophilia. He died in prison at the age of 81 after violent attacks inside prisons and psychiatric facilities.
Kitty’s abuser served her sentence, while she remained forever in the collective imagination as the girl no one helped, such as the woman who died in front of 38 witnesses who could not react, as explained by the media and published in AM Rosenthal’s famous book “Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Case of Kitty Genovese” , editor of the New York Times at the time.
However, according to a study published in american Psychologist magazine in 2007, the story of Kitty Genovese’s murder has been somewhat exaggerated by the media. In fact, in the documentary, the witness? (2015), we can see Kitty’s brother’s struggle trying to figure out what really happened and fall on something as simple as it was dark: no one could really see what was going on, and those who called the police were ignored because none of them. could clearly explain what was going on.
In any case, this fact was used by social psychologists to formulate the “theory of the extent of responsibility”. In fact, it doesn’t matter if witnesses witnessed the assault on Kitty Genovese or not, whether or not they called the police. It doesn’t matter if it’s 12, 20 or 38 people, according to the New York Times report, the problem was that no one responded to her screams, for 30 minutes no one stopped or approached the place where she was attacked.
Psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané explained this behavior through the “sharing of responsibility” theory. In this theory, it is implied that the more people are present, the more likely they are to stop acting, waiting for a shared responsibility, that is, I will do nothing, because someone will certainly do it. When someone needs help, observers assume that someone else will help, that someone will do something. However, the result of this individual reflection is that all observers refrain from intervening, and responsibility will be completely diluted within the group.
When responsibility is diluted in the group, no one assumes anything. That’s something we can observe when we ask for something. Is it better to say, “Peter, please turn on the light?Please, someone turns on the light. ” In the first case, we call a specific person and avoid this dissemination of responsibility.
Finally, other modulating factors are involved in the allocation of responsibilities, relating to cases of aid or assistance:
Kitty Genovese’s sad case has had a significant impact on our society. For example, he helped create the famous 911 hotline in the United States. He has inspired songs, movies and TELEVISION series, and even characters like Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”.
“If you want peace, you won’t get it through violence. “John Lennon?
Kitty was that voice that screamed in the early morning of March 1964, a moan lost at night that, like an echo, repeats itself day after day in our reality in different ways, perhaps because, as human beings, we normalize violence. A few days ago, and by way of example, a group of fans of the Belgrano de Cerdoba team pushed a 22-year-old from one of the stadium stands.
After falling from a height of 5 meters, the child fell to the ground, suffered severe trauma and died a few hours later, while the rest of the childhood walked up and down the stands as if nothing had happened. , as if this life were just part of the stadium furniture. Until the police finally arrived.
Perhaps the exhibition remains aggressive (whether in certain sporting events, on television, on the Internet, etc. ) makes us more tolerant, passive and less reactionary to violence, but what is clear is that it is not logical, justifiable or much less human.
We must stop being mere witnesses, act as a piece of sugar that dissolves in the dough to do the same as others, that is, nothing, we must have initiative, we are active agents in the most integral sense of coexistence, respect and above all, let us have a real concern for others.