One of the most extraordinary and depressing stories you’ll read anywhere in the world, this, and it happened in Philadelphia, a modern, western, very liberal city:
As a woman was being raped while on a train near Philadelphia on Wednesday night, riders watched, failed to intervene and did not call 911, the authorities said.
A man whom officials identified as Fiston Ngoy sat down next to a woman at about 10 p.m. on a train that was traveling westbound on the Market-Frankford Line toward the 69th Street Transportation Center. Mr. Ngoy “attempted to touch her a few times,” said Andrew Busch, a spokesman for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, known as SEPTA.
The woman pushed back and tried to stop Mr. Ngoy from touching her, Mr. Busch said. “Then, unfortunately, he proceeded to rip her clothes off,” Mr. Busch said on Sunday.
The assault lasted about eight minutes, and no passengers in the train car intervened, the authorities said.
Not only did nobody intervene to help the victim. It actually is worse than that:
Several passengers were in the train car but Mr. Bernhardt declined to say how many; investigators were still working to determine the exact number, he said. While there were not “dozens of people” in the car at the time, Mr. Bernhardt said, there were enough that, “collectively, they could have gotten together and done something.”
He added that investigators had received reports of some passengers recording the attack on their phones but that the police had not confirmed those reports.
Now it’s possible, you suppose, that some of the people who may have videoed the incident thought they were helping by producing evidence which can be used against the assailant at trial. But that’s very thin gruel. It is equally possible that we’re a society so engrossed in viral culture that some of them just wanted to share the footage on social media to go viral, not unlike some of those videos you see where people ask you to be amazed at one dog pulling another dog out of a river while the human being with two hands…. videos the thing and does nothing to help.
Also, that argument does not hold water because…. nobody called the police. Not one person. They had phones, and instead of calling the police, they watched, and perhaps filmed, the attack.
There’s an argument, at least in theory, that says that those who did not intervene may have had good reasons. For example, they may have feared that the assailant was armed and would actively seek to hurt them, or endanger the woman further, had they intervened. Again, those arguments do not amount to much.
In any society, the willingness of people to defend other people who are being attacked is one of the major deterrants to crime. It is why you do not, usually, see rapes or assault in broad daylight in front of an audience. No villain in their right mind would think that they would get away with it. Except in this case, the villain was allowed to continue his attack while people watched.
There are very few explanations, other than that something in modern society is actively re-wiring the human brain in such a way to make us less instinctively compassionate. What that is, only experts could say. But this woman was not only raped by one man. She was, in effect, raped by the whole train carriage. How did people end up that way?