Benlog

This past Saturday morning, on a Paris subway train, a young woman and her 13-month-old baby were assaulted by six men. The men were initially after her money. Then, because her ID listed her address in the 16th arrondissement (a wealthy part of Paris), they assumed she was Jewish. They proceeded to cut her hair with a knife, rip her clothes, and draw swastikas on her stomach.

It was 10am on a Saturday morning. There were numerous people on the train. No one intervened. No one called for help. No witnesses have yet to come forward.

This is a classic example of the Bystander Effect, where individuals are less likely to help a person in need when other people are around. It happened in 1964 in NYC to Kitty Genovese. You might have felt a hint of the effect yourself if you’ve ever seen someone verbally abusing another passenger on a bus: sure you think it’s wrong, but you come up with all sorts of reasons for not intervening: maybe the intervention won’t be welcome, or maybe you’ll look a bit stupid for meddling.

In the end, I don’t blame the individuals on the train that morning. Instead, I blame bystanders of a different type: the French Government. For years, anti-semitism in France has been on the rise. The French Socialist Party did nothing when it was in power. The current government has talked a lot, but done little so far. This type of assault doesn’t just happen. It happens because the general atmosphere has made anti-semitism more permissible. First the insults, then the symbolic attacks, then the real attacks.

The guilty bystanders are the government officials who conveniently ignored the growing problem. It turns out, France has a good samaritan law: it is a crime to fail to help a person in need. I suspect some of those passive passengers are particularly worried about speaking up for this very reason. What about the government officials who failed to heed the warning signs? Shouldn’t the good samaritan standard apply to them, too?