Looking On

THOSE OF US who try to maintain faith in human compassion and morality in a crazy and unstable world sometimes face challenges that are hard to counter. Every so often something jars us, something shakes up our sensibilities and makes us question whether this world of ours is all right. Things happen, sometimes, that make us pretty sure that anything we ever held was good about society just might not be.

A woman and a few police officers and all the residents of a community south of Boston have been wondering for a week now what's gone wrong Last Sunday night a 12-year-old woman walked into Big Dan's bar in New Bedford buy a pack of cigarettes. As she was on her way out the door, a man allegedly threw her to the floor, grabbed her breasts, and then stripped her from the waist down and dragged her across the floor to a pool table, where she was continually raped by four men over a period of two and a half hours.

According to press accounts, a dozen patrons and a bartender were in Big Dan's that night. Over those two and a half hours, the woman screamed and called for help. And not one of them offered her aid. Not one of them called the police. Nor did those twelve spectators merely sit in silence and try to ignore the horror occurring in front of them. They cheered.

It is easy to make excuses for ourselves. Anyone who was not in that bar that night has no idea what happened, what was going through the minds of those four men--or the dozen bystanders. It's easy to say what we would have done, to castigate those people who sat and did not help. But the effects of a dark place, and a big crowd, and a lot of alcohol are strange and unpredictable.

The rape could easily seem a bizarre, isolated incident--one that says much more about four men and twelve spectators, and about Big Dan's bar than about us, about human nature. But something that had happened two days earlier in a little town called Jacksonville. Alabama, makes that view far less plausible.

That Friday, a man named Cecil Andrews called the local television station four times threatening to set himself on fire in the town square as a protest against unemployment in America. An official at the station telephoned the police, and then sent two cameramen to the square. At 11:10 p.m. the cameramen found Andrews. They were certain, they said later, that police were hiding somewhere in the small square, and would intervene. So they started to film, watching from a few yards as Andrews doused himself with lighter fluid and fumbled with matches. A flame started up on his blue jeans. The cameras rolled. The men watched. The flame spread across the victim's leg. The men continued to film.

It was only a full 37 seconds after they started filming that one of the camermen decided not to stand and watch the man die. He ran over and attempted to beat the flames down. His partner continued to film. Andrews was rushed to University Hospital, where he was listed in poor condition with second and third-degree burns on half his body.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS have all sorts of explanations for the way people act. It is generally assumed that there is safety in numbers--that if you encounter an emergency situation, the presence of bystanders affords some kind of protection. But investigation of actual events has proved otherwise. In 1963, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death outside her New York apartment. The crime took place over a period of one half hour, as 38 of her neighbors watched. No one helped. No one even called the police.

After extensive research into the case, psychologists concluded that the lack of response had nothing to do with lack of caring, with apathy or with urban alienation. People in large groups don't respond to emergencies because the responsibility--and the guilt--is so diffused that no one sees intervention as his duty. We assume that in every crowd, someone else is more responsible, more moral than ourselves.

But the people who watched a woman being raped last week, and the cameramen who watched Cecil Andrews burn himself, were not mere inactive bystanders. They were audiences. Social conditioning may explain people's fear of getting involved. But something about last week's events defies explanation.

WHY DID the people cheer? Why did a television station send cameras to film a man commiting suicide at all? There is no psychological commentary to explain the phenomenon we are exposed to every time we turn on local television news or read tabloid newspapers--the desire to get a little entertainment our of somebody else's tragedy. What explains banner headlines about parents killing their children? What explains the fact that whenever there is a shooting or a serious traffic accident the camera van from a television station often arrives before an ambulance?

Most of us will never find ourselves witnessing a rape or being called to the scene to see a man try to burn himself to death. But as long as curiosity remains a tenet of human astute, we will hear about these situations. And we who watch from a distance--who read the front-page stories and flip on our sets nightly to catch the film at eleven--can only ask ourselves: If we And been there, what would we really have done?