Even if it looked like a bad or potentially dangerous situation to get involved in, what I find unforgiveable is that no one dialed 911.
That’s what you’re supposed to do when you see a bad or potentially dangerous situation.
I wasn’t there, but in my mind I cannot come up with a circumstance in which stepping outside the store and calling 911 on a cell phone would be a bad or even uncomfortable thing.
The decision to do nothing at all is still a decision, and sometimes it’s the worst possible decision of all that you can make.
And it still has consequences.
The people who didn’t help her now have to spend the rest of their lives knowing that someone died in part because they chose not to act. In my own ethical code, that makes them share responsibility for her death along with the person who stabbed her: in effect, they are all now murderers.
I have a few times, and I can tell you, stressfull as it was, and as ungrateful as some can be, my heart, and my Karma know that I did the right thing. May you and all around you never have to find out if you would do more than jsut stand there or turn away.
I wish I could remember the case…come on…help me out here…it was back in the 60s, in NYC, about thirty apartment dwellers listened to a woman in the alley below be raped and killed, a time span of thirty minutes or so, and NO ONE called the police or came to her aid until after it was over, in spite of her screams for help. Supposedly that’s when studies began of this tendency of “groups” not offering help, and the findings that if there’s just one other person, they usually DO help.
The woman killed was Kitty Genovese—I hope I have the spelling right. It was a huge story. That is what I am finding puzzling about this story. I am finding little about it anywhere.
One dynamic brought forth was the Bystander Effect. This theory speculates that as the “number of bystanders increases, the likelihood of any one bystander helping another decreases.” As a result, additional time will pass before anyone seeks outside help for a person in distress. Another hypothesis is something called the Diffusion of Responsibility. This is simply a decrease in the feeling of personal responsibility one feels when in the presence of many other people. The greater the number of bystanders, the less responsibility the individual feels. In cases where there are many people present during an emergency, it becomes much more likely that any one individual will simply do nothing.