SERIOUS
QUESTIONS EASILY, IF UNCOMFORTABLY, ANSWERED
“DIFFUSION
OF RESPONSIBILITY” AT WORK?
Amanda
Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight at the age they were abducted
(Tuesday May 7, 2013
Cleveland, OH) When three young women
and a small child were rescued from what was at least a decade of imprisonment
by three brothers, it was presented in the media as an unusually happy ending
to a sadly familiar story. And that it
was. However, the facts of the case and
the sheer length of the forced imprisonment beg questions that might make some
a little uncomfortable. Surely, one
might say, if three young women and a child were being held in captivity by
“my” neighbors, I would certainly have known and done something about it. Yes, one could say that and believe it to be
the absolute truth. Yet too often in our
self-absorbed personal isolationist society we have seen that not borne out in
reality.
In just the last five years we
have seen numerous reports of newborns left in dumpsters, children found
chained to radiators, miserably abused by those responsible for their care be
they parents, foster parents or other guardians. Besides the cases that break through into the
national media there are untold local stories of such depravity and inhumanity
being perpetrated not in secluded habitats
where the screams of the abducted, tortured, tormented and often murdered, are
far from being heard but rather right in apartments and houses in densely
populated cities and suburbs. These
stories shock and sicken us as well they should but they stand as ugly
statements of how we live our lives and how effective the blinders of “minding
my business” can be.
In ways subtle and overt we
are extraordinarily connected with each other technologically and conversely
ensconced in our own ear-bud provided atmospheric bubble that shuts out the
rest of the world and seems to be alienating us from each other at a pace never
dreamed possible just a decade ago, just when a 20 year old woman and two high
school students suddenly vanished from the streets of this gritty down on its
luck Rustbelt city. There was a time
when such disconnectedness was alleged to be the life style of the big city
dwellers. People who lived in the
suburbs, exurbs and especially the rural areas of the country could read the
paper telling of some urban horror that went unnoticed, some cry for help that
fell on unhearing ears, some sounds and smells emanating from the neighbor
upstairs that no one felt compelled to report to their local authorities, and
think themselves to be superior; they, surely, would have known something was
amiss because “we know our neighbors”.
That is simply no longer the case, if it ever really was.
KITTY FROM QUEENS & THE ‘GENOVESE SYNDROME’
Part enduring urban myth, part
tragic tale of benign indifference, the death of a young woman from Kew
Gardens, Queens, New York City on March 13, 1964 came to define what social
psychologists call the “diffusion of responsibility”. Ms. Genovese was brutally attacked by a
knife-wielding sex predator after parking her car across the street from her
apartment at 2 o’clock in the morning.
Kitty screamed as her attacker followed her, continuing to stab her even
as dozens of neighbors heard her cries in the night. Neighbors turned on their lights, some yelled
at the window at Kitty and her attacker not realizing what they were witnessing
was a murder in progress not a lover’s quarrel.
The first call to the NYPD was received many minutes after neighbors
first were awakened by Kitty’s pleas for mercy.
It was in the aftermath of this event that struck at the heart of the
quiet Queens neighborhood and the City at large that the Police were able to
determine the sequence of events.
Headlines told of dozens of Kew Gardens residents who heard screams and
did not call the Police.
The sad story of Kitty
Genovese came to be one of the first reported cases of “The Bystander Effect”
also known as “The Genovese Syndrome”.
Virtually all the residents of that neighborhood who spoke to NYPD
Detectives in the days after Kitty’s death commented that they did not phone
the Police because they thought someone already had. Some of those interviewed simply stated they
felt that the commotion out in the street below was “none of my business” and
that they “did not want to get involved”.
ONE MAN’S CEILING IS ANOTHER MAN’S FLOOR
City dwellers value their
privacy because it is in short supply and have always respected their
neighbors’ right to privacy. Prior to
greater public awareness of domestic and child abuse, proximity was no reason
to breech the unwritten code of city living.
One could hear through the party wall at night a neighbor arguing and
beating his wife but it was never spoken of in the light of day. This characteristic of urbanites came to be
an element of the stereotypical portrayal that non-urbanites used to define the
rude, uncaring, cold and calloused denizens of the big city. The ability to mind one’s business, to not
get involved with whatever they heard going on around them was deeply rooted in
the patriarchal tenet that a man is “king in his castle”; what transpired
behind closed doors was no one else’s concern and that there was no excuse for
the “airing of dirty laundry” outside the confines of the family apartment.
It was well into the 1980’s
before there were any concerted efforts by legislators and the Law Enforcement
Community (LEC) to empower neighbors to get involved, for bystanders to
intervene. It is commonplace - actually
mandatory - today for doctors and nurses
in Emergency Rooms to make certain inquiries when a child is brought in with
certain types of injuries that are suggestive of or consistent with physical
abuse. This was certainly not the case
in the 1950’s and the days when even professionals including Law Enforcement
Officers (LEO) were reluctant to “get involved”.
It took a paradigm shift of
epic proportions before matters would change and allow for “outsiders” to
intervene in cases of domestic and child abuse.
In 186 Connecticut enacted the “Tracey Thurman Law” which made an arrest
mandatory when Police were called to a domestic disturbance and there was
obvious evidence that abuse had occurred.
This removed the onus from the often terrified battered woman in the
household who had been so brutally conditioned into submission after enduring
violence for years. Other states quickly
followed suit.
The tragic abductions and
murders of two little girls resulted in laws that carry their names. Polly’s Law, named after Polly Klaas from
California who was kidnapped from her bed in the middle of the night and
subsequently murdered by a known, previously convicted sexual predator. The nationwide “AMBER Alert” system named
after 9 year old Amber Hagerman, who was abducted in Arlington, Texas in 1996,
is designed to enlist a broad range of resources including the general public in
locating missing children as soon after they disappear as possible. While these important laws may seem a bit tangential
to the Cleveland story they are part of an enhanced and more sophisticated
arsenal at the disposal of the legal and law enforcement network actively
employed today; they are tools that were unavailable until relatively recently.
AN ERIE FEELING
The Castro
Brothers
The details of what the three
abductees held captive by three brothers in this city that hugs the shore of
Lake Erie will no doubt slowly emerge in the coming days. Already there are claims that the authorities
had been called to that house of horrors over the years but there was
“insufficient” cause for further investigation.
Some neighbors on the block are now coming forward with tales of seeing
a woman chained up in the backyard of the going to seed house where the women
were held captive. It may take some time
before the entire story is revealed but at least, in this case, a moment of
opportunity and a few neighbors willing to get involved literally freed the
horrifically enslaved victims of these sadistic perpetrators.
Actually the neighbor who
first approached the house when he heard a woman screaming for help, Charles
Ramsey, has already received the type of media attention we have come to expect
in our hyper-wired world. He is being
hailed as a hero because he chose to get involved and it was his willingness to
do so, to do what we would all like to believe is common sense and the sort of
thing we would have done in that situation, that has differentiated him as
having acted “heroically”. It is a powerful
yet disturbing statement on our society when a man can be called a hero for
doing what should come naturally to all of us; he reacted to a situation and
quickly and decisively acted. Had he
not, those 3 women and that child may still be in captivity of the most
depraved nature.
Too often we are content to “play
it safe” and are comfortable in the role of the bystander. As Jeffrey Dammer was seducing and abducting
young homosexual men from the streets of Milwaukee in the early 1900’s, taking
them home for sex and to cannibalize, his neighbors had lived with strange
sounds and rancid odors emanating from his apartment for months. No one called the Police. John Wayne Gacey had the bodies of over 30
young boys buried beneath his suburban Chicago home and allegedly his neighbors
were blithely unaware. A house of
horrors is discovered in Philadelphia only after a utility company meter reader
became suspicious about the goings on in that dilapidated row house where over
22 young foster children were chained to the floors and being systematically
tortured and starved. The neighbors
never thought it was unusual that they had seen children going into that house
but never coming out. No one ever called
the Police. This is just a fraction of
what is seemingly an infinite list of similar crimes that all share the common
denominator of having bystander neighbors living next door to utter madness.
SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING
Since the tragic events of
September 11, 2001 we have become a heavily surveilled country. In public we are virtually always within
range of a closed circuit TV camera, a security monitor or some other hi-tech
tracking device. Thousands of hours of
footage is collected across the country daily by all manner of authorities. Some have argued, and rightfully so, that our
loss of privacy represents an erosion of our Constitutionally guaranteed rights
to freedom of movement, expression and assembly. That may be so. But our security seems to
trump our privacy concerns at least in the eyes of federal courts across the
land.
In New York City, one of the
most monitored cities on the planet, the New York City Police Department (NYPD)
has also introduced and implemented a campaign to engage the public called “See
something, say something.” This is
intended to constantly remind New Yorkers that if they see an unattended
package on the subway, a “suspicious” person loitering around a landmark, or
anything out of the ordinary in the familiar landscape of their daily commute
and neighborhood where they live, to contact the Police. The recent bombing at the Boston Marathon may
very well have been averted in New York City since the public is acutely aware
of noticing suspect items like the two backpacks the alleged bombers left near
a mailbox and a storefront.
This “see something, say
something” mentality should be discreetly exercised in other areas of concern
besides terrorism. There is a balance to
be sure between intrusiveness and inquisitiveness; between callously ambivalent
and cautiously alert. As a society we
have gotten better at taking action when we feel a situation warrants it. There is no way to calculate how many
potential abductions have been averted by the intervention of a passerby or an
alert customer in the mall. As parents and
teachers today continually drill into our children’s heads the idea of not
talking with strangers, not going anywhere with someone they do not know, of
being instructed to scream as loud as they can if they are being taken,
abductions still occur with an alarming frequency and the majority of them
remain as unsolved cases for years on end just as had the abductions of the
three young Cleveland girls until yesterday.
The surprising events of
yesterday have offered some degree of renewed hope for the parents of the
missing, relatives of the children we see on billboards in Walmart and in other
locales. There are predators of every
twisted ilk living and preying among us, next door to us, maybe down the
street. As we have seen time and time
again these people do not have horns and breathe fire; they blend into their
environment and even live amicably in close proximity to us.
As the story of the last
decade of captivity that the three young women here endured becomes more
complete, there may be lessons learned.
There may also be revealed some missed opportunities, a few moments
frozen in time that with all the certainty and clarity of hindsight emerge as
telling. There always are. It is inevitable. Some of the responses offered by neighbors in
past instances such as this all too often portray the perpetrator as a “nice,
quiet man” who “kept to himself”, was “helpful” to those very same neighbors
who must go on a live with the knowledge that there was evil in their midst for
years and years and they do not know. Or,
perhaps, did not want to know.
Kitty Genovese screamed and
begged for her life on a dark Queens New York street 49 years ago and is
forever remembered as a victim not only
of her vicious attacker but also of her indifferent neighbors who all thought
someone else was calling the Police.
They were wrong.
TAGS: AMANDA BERRY, MICHELLE
KNIGHT, GINA DEJESUS, CLEVELAND ABDUCTIONS, DECADE OF CAPTIVITY, CASTRO BROTHERS,
CHARLES RAMSEY, KITTY GENOVESE, POLLY KLAAS, AMBER HAGERMAN, TRACEY THURMAN,
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LAWS, “DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY”, PRIVACY, SAFETY,
AWARENESS
LINKS:
Copyright The Brooding Cynyx 2013 © All Rights Reserved
