Stephen McGinty: Sign of sad society when cry for help goes unanswered

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 21:46

IN 1973, Harlan Ellison, the science fiction writer with a voice like a ballpeen hammer on broken glass, wrote a disturbing short story called The Whimper of Whipped Dogs. It was about a student murdered in the courtyard of a New York apartment block, an act witnessed by residents who stand in silence at windows and on balconies.

Drifting above the scene is a strange fog, whose coils of smokey condensation appear to have eyes and is, in literary terms, the embodiment of the city's cold indifference.

The plot was inspired by the notorious murder nine years previously of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese, a 28-year-old bar manager who, at 3am on 13 March, 1964, was stabbed, raped and murdered in the courtyard of her apartment block. The New York Times later reported that as many as 38 neighbours had seen various parts of the attack, which lasted, on and off, for 30 minutes, but no-one had gone to her aid. One man had shouted, "Let that girl alone", and when the culprit, Winston Moseley, backed away, the neighbour considered his job to be done. What happened next is chilling. Moseley sneaked away to his car, retrieved a wide-brimmed hat to better conceal his face, then returned. Kitty Genovese, by this time, had crawled bleeding into the stairwell but was unable to escape Moseley, who stabbed her again, raped her and left her to die. Despite what was later reported, a call to the police was made, but the witness said the girl appeared to be fine. Yet the fact remained, no-one went to her aid.

The case would become legendary in sociological circles for what it said about contemporary society. A social, psychological phenomenon was coined called "bystander effect" or "Genovese syndrome", in which the responsibility to act, to help a fellow human being, becomes diluted by numbers. If no-one makes the first move, each individual then takes comfort in the idea that their own failure to act is the right thing to do. The person who should act is not them, but one of the others.

The fate of Kitty Genovese and the city's cold indifference came back to me this week as I read the coroner's report on the tragic death of Mark Wells, a 32-year-old aircraft fitter. In the early hours of a Sunday morning last August, Mr Wells accidentally dropped his keys down a storm drain outside his house in Ash Road on the Isle of Wight. He lifted the metal grille and as he stretched down to reach the keys, he slipped and fell into the drain head first.

He began to cry for help.

The neighbours heard the cries, one later commenting on his "pleading tone".

They assumed he was drunk and ignored him.

Mark Wells was left to suffocate to death, 30 feet from his front door and six feet from the two nearest houses.

This week, the coroner did not blame the residents for ignoring his cries but said it was "a sad reflection on society that people were too scared to venture out of their homes when they heard screams". I think the coroner was wrong, and that he should have pointed out that, when we hear a cry for help, we have a clear moral duty to assume it is genuine and not to dismiss it as a drunken prank. Anyone who heard Mr Wells could have easily called the police at no risk to their own safety.

Many years ago, my father-in-law was working on his car when it collapsed on top of him. Badly injured, he succeeded in crawling out but then lost count of the number of people who stepped over him, believing he was drunk, as he struggled to get home. If we fail to act, if we put an imagined fear ahead of an actual cry, then we are lost in the fog that haunts the pages of Harlan Ellison's disturbing work.