When Kitty Genovese was killed on a Queens street in 1964 with a dozen or more of her neighbors watching and listening, it spawned a line of psychological research into the “bystander effect,” nicknamed “Genovese syndrome.” The idea is that the larger a number of bystanders to a crime, the less likely they will be to help — each assuming someone else will step in.
For a little while, it seemed like 9/11, and the heroism it prompted, overtook that sort of thinking. We lionized the heroes of that day, especially those who made individual decisions to try to save lives. “Let’s roll” became our motto and in several future terrorist attempts, like the shoe-bomber, it was regular people who stood up and stopped it.
It wasn’t just terrorism, either. The New York blackout in 2003 brought a similar feeling: People immediately tried to help, whether by directing traffic, helping elderly up stairs or generally checking in on their neighbors. Everyone wanted to be a minor hero.
Yet so many people had the opportunity to be a real hero for the boys allegedly being molested by Jerry Sandusky — and none of them stepped up.
Everyone seems to have an excuse for passing the buck. By all accounts, Mike McQueary, now assistant coach at Penn State, personally witnessed the most horrific abuse of a 10-year old boy in 2002. Not only did he fail to stop it as it was in progress, he didn’t even call the police. Instead, he called his father and Coach Joe Paterno.
Paterno also didn’t call the police (as didn’t McQueary’s father) and instead passed along the information to athletic director Tim Curley and a vice president, Gary Schultz. They, in turn, notified University President Graham Spanier. Nobody did anything.
Don’t dismiss what happened at Penn State as merely covering up for an assistant coach of a popular football program. There were other people, outside the football universe, who had witnessed the abuse or knew of it, but also did nothing. A janitor named Jim Calhoun reportedly saw Sandusky abusing a boy in 2000. He told the other janitors what he’d seen, and yet no one came forward.
Any of the people mentioned here more than likely told their wives, their friends, their relatives what they had seen or what they knew. Few people can truly keep secrets — especially a secret as big as this. Yet no one acted.
People keep saying, “The university should have done something.” The fact is that it’s not “the university” which could have done something — it’s McQueary, his father, Paterno, Curley, Schultz, Spanier, Calhoun, the other janitors and anyone else who knew about this repulsive and awful story.
Only one person needed to be a hero to stop the abuse of these boys, but no one stepped up. The price would have been so low; it wasn’t confronting a terrorist or stepping between a woman and a knife-wielding maniac. A simple phone call to the police might have sufficed, yet no one managed that.
Would Kitty Genovese be any safer today?
Karol Markowicz blogs at alarmingnews.com.