The Bystander Problem.

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?