The 'Good Samaritan' was apparently a parable, only a parable.

In a dimly-lit alley behind the supervised school dance of a Richmond, California High-school, a 15-year-old girl was brutally assaulted and raped for over two hours. So far, 6 alleged assailants have been arrested for the unimaginable crime, some as young as 15-years old themselves. They will be tried as adults and I will accordingly leave their fate up to the courts of California. This leaves us with a string of up to twenty boys and men that passed by, watched and even may have casually participated in the sexual assault during the course of the 2-hour nightmare. Twenty boys and men that, assuming they only watched or assuming they only passed by, didn’t assist the girl in distress, didn’t advise the supervisors of the dance and didn’t even call 911. Indeed, the girl, battered and in shock, was later found bleeding to death under a street bench by a decidedly more generous passer-by. She luckily survived and will hopefully be able to identify the culprits, violent and negligent, as we remember the parable of the “Good Samaritan”.

Every time I read something about this crime, such as the local sheriff blasting the local youth for a lack of humanity, I was not only appalled by the violent and endless nature of the crime but rather I was much more shock by the actions, or lack thereof, of the bystanders. As my regular readers may know, I am not the most religious of men but Luke (10,25-37) stood out in my mind from my days in Catholic School as I remembered Jesus telling of the good man from Samaria. Redefining what it was to be ‘good’ to one’s neighbour and even redefining ‘neighbour’ as any other inhabitant of our planet, it reminds me now that the Bible is not all propaganda and a code of ignorance. Taken as a figurative, symbolic and spiritual guide rather than a literal code of doctrine, the Good Book has some very valid and timeless advice to give, but I digress.

Not all bad...

My next realization came when the local Sheriff in Richmond, California, Lt. Mark Gagan, with an air of deep frustration said: “We do not have the ability to arrest people who witnessed the crime and did nothing. The law can be rigid. We don’t have the authority to make an arrest.” How could this be? Western law is based on the Good Book itself. Shouldn’t we have a law forcing people to at least call 911 when they witness such a crime? I then asked myself if it wouldn’t infringe on our basic rights to be forced into this agreement and then thought if common sense would be enough to prevent the need for such a law. I was surprised to see that yes, we would need a law otherwise we would just start having tickets sold to the next rape or cannibal killing. I don’t know why I’m surprised; we actually had to make a law to tell people not to kill each other…

Too bad Jeffrey Dahmer isn't here in 2009, he would have sold-out his cannibal killings and rape of homosexual men

Historically, for North America at least, it isn’t as if they haven’t tried. The ethical and judiciary debate over one’s duty to assist (I reiterate: at least in the MINIMUM capacity of calling 911) has been raging on for many decades. As I saw on the series finale of ‘Seinfeld’, I thought that the USA had a federal ‘Good Samaritan’ law that could send a person to a year of prison for not assisting a person victim of a crime. To my great surprise, my research revealed otherwise. In the province of Quebec, Canada, one has a duty to call for assistance in the case of a car crash but it covers no other crime and even forgets to include any penalty for not observing this law. The State of Vermont requires a bystander to provide reasonable assistance (911) and will slap you with a $100 fine if you don’t. The State of Minnesota will actually accuse you of a petty misdemeanour if you don’t assist. That’s it. We’re done. A few other states are juggling with the possibility of introducing similar ‘slap-on-the-wrist’ penalties but for all intents and purposes, all other Canadian provinces and American states have no law requiring the assistance of bystanders.

In the 1970s, ‘good Samaritan’ laws were widely left aside because of the complex legality of the legislation. In fact, the problem is that an assistant become liable when aiding a victim. If you see a car crash, call 911, help the driver get out and he ends up paralysed, in most states and provinces, you will be fully liable to be sued in court. Following this logic, it seems that, in 2009, we won’t help anyone out of concern for ourselves. Funny enough, 2000 years ago, this is what the priest and temple assistant did when they saw the beaten up Jewish man. They went to the other side of the street, ignoring the man in order to not be targeted by his assailants or to be associated with the defiled man. It only took one Samaritan who worried about what would happen to the victim if he did nothing, rather than what would happen to himself if he did something.

Another argument to explain non-intervention is the 'Bystander Effect' which states that the more bystanders there are, the more the responsibility of assistance is spread thin amongst them. I don't wholly agree with a theory that excuses any of this.

In closing, I have always been a pessimistic man and a cynical historian but even I couldn’t imagine that the youth of today could be so blind to the lessons of History. I am not naive or hippyish enough to believe in world peace but not helping a defenceless girl and actually watching part of a 2-hour rape is reminiscent of the worst acts committed by the worst people in History. Jewish collaborators during the Nazi occupation of Poland stood by and didn’t assist. The end of the war saw some swift and perhaps unsanctioned and vigilante justice coming their way. California law cannot bring justice to the girl, her family and to the thousands of local residents who are now tarnished as a local society of negligent savages. Perhaps Karma will eventually have a way of making it up to the perverted cowards that stood by and watched.

End.

(Post Scriptum: This article had me in a deep contemplation about the Good Samaritan but there is also another question to be asked: where the hell were school administrators, security guards and teachers while this was going on behind the building? The principal says that it wasn’t in the school so he is not responsible. I hope karma gets him too.)