The Crime of Being A Victim

Unfortunately, this entry has nothing to do with my travels.

I read a story in the news today that startled me. It was about a woman who was apparently beheaded at random in a Spanish resort marketplace on the Canary Islands. The crime allegedly committed by some Bulgarian homeless man.

My first reaction wasn’t what you would expect. There was no horror; there was no anger; there was no emotion period. I, like many people these days, am desensitized to hearing about acts of violence through the media. Instead, the thought that ran through my head was, “How?”

I mean, how could that have happened? I don’t mean how that vagrant could do such a thing. I personally believe that there are no limits to human depravity and that anyone and everyone has the capability to do horrible things. What I mean is, how could he physically do it uninterrupted in the middle of crowded marketplace?

I apologize in advance to the squeamish people reading this but I have to be somewhat descriptive to make my point. You see, a human being, like any other animal, will not just sit there and let you slowly kill it. This man beheaded the woman with a knife that he stole from the same market and there is no way to quickly behead someone with a knife.

That leaves one possibility; the man must have killed the woman with the knife and then beheaded her. There are multiple ways to do this but none of them are exactly quick. The quicker ways, like a knife through the heart, require precision execution that I doubt the hobo in question could pull off. Based on this line of thought, the woman would have suffered a slow, violent, and excessively noticeable death in the midst of a crowd of people.

And nobody stepped in to help.

There is well documented research that classifies this as the Bystander Effect or Genovese Syndrome. It explains the phenomenon observed in the above story. It basically confirms that people are much closer to sheep than sentient beings.

One of the main tracks within the research is the concept of diffusion of responsibility. In layman’s terms, it explains that when a group is confronted with this sort of situation they think the following:

“Someone else is bound to help.”

In short, this pisses me off. This mentality allowed the woman in Spain to become a victim. This mentality ensures that there will be many more victims. By not taking responsibility on themselves these people are implicit and responsible for the death of this woman. They may not have been able to save that woman but they should have tried. This all too human phenomenon is flat out as criminal as the act of killing was.

Now, you are probably thinking, “Who are you to judge? Would you have done any different?”

The answer is yes I would have and more to point I have before on several occasions. I didn’t jump in a front of a knife but I did put myself at risk. There was a similar story about a year ago about a man who was stabbed and bled to death in a crowded street after saving a woman from the same fate. That man is what all of you should be like. Whether he knew it or not, that man was willing to die to help that woman, as it should be. Some things are worth dying for. Ironically, the preservation of life is one of them.

But most, if not all, of you are more like the crowd in that market on the Canary Islands.

That makes some of you victims waiting to happen and the others…potential criminals who are victims of circumstance.