The murder of twenty eight year old Catherine (Kitty) Genovese on the morning of March 13th, 1964 was one that would be remembered in history as prompting the discovery of the “bystander effect”. The 1960’s was an era of change within the United States. The military draft and Vietnam War had caused uproar amongst the youth who now turned to psychoactive drugs for recreation and were slowly succumbing to the rise of the hippie movement. “Free love” stemmed from this movement and viewed the subject of sex as a non taboo natural occurrence free to be engaged in by all.
Subsequently, woman who had generally been full time house makers were now joining the work force and discovering “feminist” ideas due to Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique. However, these changes did not sit well with many and the majority preferred to stay with their “traditional” ideals on how men and women should behave and their positions in society. Kitty was the eldest child of five; she grew up in Brooklyn in a Middle-Class Italian American family.
Later on in life, Kitty acquired a position as a bar manager for Ev’s Eleventh Hour Sports Bar in Queens and she was known to be a Gay individual due to the fact that she shared her Kew Gardens apartment with her lover Mary Ann Zielonko. Even though the United States was experiencing a cultural revolution, Kitty’s lifestyle was still looked down upon in society. The fact that Ms. Genovese was a female bar manager and worked late hours was especially distressing to many. Around 3:15 AM, Kitty had returned home from work and parked her car 100 feet away from her apartment building.
School Facilities Work On The Weekend
Students on the NC State campus are not allowed to have access to the gym and music center facilities at peak hours of boredom during the weekend. During the week while the student's are hurrying to and from classes, they are busy, hard working, and tired of the stress that comes along with balancing academics in college. When the weekend comes around, everyone should be allowed to have a way to ...
On her walk home, Kitty was attacked, robbed, raped, and stabbed several times by Winston Moseley. During the attack, Kitty had desperately screamed out for help but not even one call was made to the police by her neighbors until 3:50 AM (30 minutes into the attack).
The police responded within minutes of the call, but Kitty was in such critical condition that she died on route to the hospital at 4:15 AM. After further investigation and psychiatric examination Winston Moseley, a twenty nine year old African American business machine operator, was found o be a necrophile. The public was appalled by the murder of Ms. Genovese. Mainly because it had taken so long for her neighbors to contact the authorities and the person who had called had only done so after much thought. An attention grabbing article titled “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police” was published shortly after the murder in the New York Times, the article read “For more than half an hour thirty eight respectable, law abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens”.
This murder was so publicized that it caused the NYPD to reform its telephone reporting system and it prompted psychological research conducted by Social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane. Darley and Latane conducted a social experiment which they titled “The Bystander Apathy Experiment”, after extensive research they concluded that “larger numbers of bystanders decrease the likelihood that someone will step forward and help a victim”. Feminist psychologist Frances Cherry disagreed with these findings however, and believed that what had occurred with Kitty would not have been true if the victim was a man.
She believed this because of the cultural norms of that era, where most people were unlikely to get involved if they thought that a man was attacking his wife/girlfriend. In conclusion, I believe that both “The Bystander Effect” and Francis Cherry’s statement are correct in deciphering the murder of Kitty Genovese due to the fact that one must take both human nature and cultural norms/facts into account when considering such a horrific event in history.
