In March 1964, the New York Times reported that 38 witnesses saw or heard a brutal, drawn-out and ultimately fatal attack on a woman called Kitty Genovese, but none did anything to help her, or even summoned the police.
The report was later shown to be erroneous, but the “bystander effect” is real. As many psychology experiments have shown, an individual is less likely to come to the aid of another if they can see that other people who could help are not doing so.
Last month, in the middle of the day on a busy street in the Italian town of Civitanova Marche, Alika Ogorchukwu, a Nigerian street vendor, was attacked and killed by a man using his bare hands. Although the police were called, and someone filmed the attack, no one intervened. Amid general outrage, an editorial in the Italian newspaper La Stampa took this as a sign that we are in “the twilight of civilization.”