Dialogue: Kate Belgrave

When silence is complicity

By KATE BELGRAVE

Once, during my golden era of inertia, I heard - and promptly lay down and ignored - a thump and a lasting shriek of fear and agony issuing from the flat that was then just behind us.

I heard it more than once, to tell the truth. I think the guy in that house liked to cuff the wife around. Dunno if I was right to think that (the sound came from far off, was always muffled and might have spoken of any number of catastrophes); what I can tell you is that I was a sight less keen than I should have been to investigate the situation.

This turning of the old blind eye was not flattering to my self-image. I was, after all, the girl who had always fancied herself as - among a number of other things - a fearless and (painfully) upstanding Citizen Kate/Nancy Drew/Trixie Belden type of camper, the one who, when called upon, would stick her nose into affairs that other people preferred to ignore.

I recently did it again, though - lay there in bed, trying to decide whether the non-stop screaming I could hear in the distance warranted a call to the police (it did in the end).

It took a while, though. We egalitarian members of the middle class are sure that we'd leap to save every unfortunate who requires our help; yet some of us are a little slow out of the blocks on the day. Sympathy fast turns into indifference. After that, it's a matter of deciding whether the victim really needs help. There's something about wanting to hear the situation to its end before getting involved - something, perhaps, about wanting to roll in the crud before cleaning it up.

And let's face it, stories of people who neglect to help people they might have helped hold endless appeal. I remember, for instance, my first-year psychology class, like thousands of first-year psychology classes before us, going bananas over the tale of Kitty Genovese's grisly death (we were studying that phenomenon that psychologists tweely refer to as "bystander apathy"). We were riveted. There was poor Kitty, coming home at 3 o'clock on that fatal morning in 1964. As everybody knows, she was attacked while walking from her car to her apartment. Her attacker stabbed her with the knife he'd brought along for the purpose (he cheerfully admitted, when arrested, that he'd left his house looking for a woman to kill). As everybody knows, Kitty fought so hard for her life, and made such a racket that it took her assailant nearly half an hour to kill her.

And, as everybody also knows, nobody in the street lifted a finger to help her in all that time. At least 38 citizens heard her screaming, but not one responded. Nobody bothered to call the police until the screaming stopped.

It was, and is, a dreadful story; what is fascinating is how everyone wanted, and presumably still wants, to write their thesis on it, devote their lives to getting to the bottom of it. Even people who weren't taking psych (most were, of course - those were the days when therapists, analysts and the like had the floor at dinner parties) were partial. A friend who wasn't taking psychology wanted to buy the textbook from me at the end of the year, so he could read Kitty's story over and over.

Every generation of students responds that way, of course; in the end, that story strikes a chord rather than touches a nerve. You like to think you would have been the compassionate neighbour; still, you also know that there is an aspect of you that prefers to turn its back on people who have drawn the short straw.

There's something about feeling slightly superior to such people, about feeling that bad luck is deserved and that you would have managed to avoid it.

Remember the rantings of the off-the-wall Holocaust theorist Daniel Goldhagen, the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners, who claimed, contrary to popular opinion, that large numbers of average Germans were active anti-Semites and active participants in the killing of the Jews?

Professor Goldhagen's theory was pretty extreme. Still, the Holocaust makes sense - as opposed to making no sense at all - when you understand that everyone knew and approved.