Kitty Genovese, Fifty Years Later

Fifty years ago today, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death just steps away from her apartment in Kew Gardens, NY.

That building is just a few minutes away from my apartment.  I've passed it any number of times.  So have countless other people.

That, of course, is one of the reasons why her murder is still discussed and is studied by students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, psychology and criminal justice.  It gave rise to what people in all of those fields call "The Bystander Effect" or "Kitty Genovese Syndrome", which says that as the number of witnesses increases, the less responsibility each one feels to act.

It's accepted as the standard explanation of why, according to accounts published ever since the day of the crime, thirty-eight people said they heard screams or other commotion, or otherwise sensed that a disturbance was taking place outside their windows, and "did nothing".  One witness said, in a phrase that's become almost a cliche, "I didn't want to get involved".

Recently, the number of people who "didn't want to get involved", or who were even awake at the time of the stabbings (between 3 and 3:30 am) has come into dispute.  What's not in dispute, though, is that when police got word of her stabbing, it was too late to save her life.

But I don't want to get into an argument about that now.  Instead, I want to talk about how Ms. Genovese's victimhood has been portrayed and another aspect of her life that was not revealed until a decade ago.

I was five years old on that cold, windy early morning when she died almost literally on her own doorstep.  I often heard about the murder as I was growing up.  For a few years, she was portrayed, probably correctly, as an innocent victim who had the misfortune of crossing paths with a homicidal maniac.  After all, Winston Moseley would say "I went out that night intending to kill a woman.  When I got such a thought, it remained with me regardless of what else I might be thinking".  And he has remained unrepentant ever since.

However, as time passed, I noticed that some people questioned "what sort of woman" Kitty actually was.  They wondered "what she was doing" when she parked her car and made that fateful walk toward her apartment at 3 in the morning.  That seemed to be a central question in a TV movie that was aired when I was a high school senior, if I recall correctly--probably around the time of the ten-year anniversary of her death.  The movie was fiction, but was not-too-loosely based on Ms. Genovese's case.  In one scene, a police detective (I think) working on the case stops a woman he sees walking home and chastises her for walking alone at night in a skirt that was "too short".

It seemed that whatever people could get book deals, tenure or fame from milking such a claim had gotten what they wanted--and that other people realized that bar managers (Ms. Genovese's line of work) and others who work in such establishments and restaurants often come home at odd hours. More important, the notion that women who are so brutalized are not "asking for it" and don't "have it coming to them" (I can remember when other women used to say such things about girls who'd been raped.) was discredited. So the notion that it was her fault that she'd been attacked by a man who stabbed her, fled when he thought someone else had seen him, and came back to "finish the job" went where it belonged--to the dustbin of history..

Now it is widely accepted, rightly, that Ms. Genovese was an extremely unfortunate soul. However, there is one other aspect of her killing to which a few people alluded a decade ago, but has rarely, if ever, been mentioned again.

As far as their neighbors knew, Mary Ann Zielonko was a friend of Kitty's who shared their apartment--you know, the "2 Broke Girls" scenario. Everyone, apparently, liked both of them, but saw more of Kitty, the more outgoing and friendly of the two. What no one realized--or simply did not say--is that Ms. Zielonko was her girlfriend. No, not in the sense of two young female friends sharing an apartment. They were partners, lovers, or whatever you choose to call them.

Ms. Zielonko did not reveal this aspect of their relationship until she was interviewed on the 40th anniversary of her girlfriend's murder. Of course, there was no reason why she should have. After all, attitudes about same-sex relationships were, to put it mildly, very different from the ones we (some of us, anyway) have now. But what if their union had been public knowledge? How might it have affected the way the case was portrayed?

More important, might Winston Moseley have been aware of it? He has never given any indication, at least verbally, that it played any role in his choosing Kitty as his victim. However, it's hard not to wonder if he approached her sexually and she said--or gave some other indication--that she was gay and therefore had no interest in him. Could that have been a factor in the viciousness of his attack?

Whatever the answer is, or isn't, to those questions, I hope that more people remember that, in the end, Catherine Susan Genovese was murdered because  she was a woman.  Too many of us have met that same awful fate.

India's Response To The Death Of A Woman Who Was Gang-Raped

In much of the world--including, at times, my hometown of New York--rape is still treated as "just" a sexual offense rather than the violent crime it is.

What that means is that sentences are relatively light.  For example, in India, rapists faced seven to ten years in prison.  Granted, I wouldn't want to spend that much time incarcerated.  However, compared to other violent offenses, rape wasn't punished harshly.

That may change.  Unfortunately, it took the death of a 23-year-old woman who was brutally gang-raped for this change to come about.

Because of a "gag" order, the victim and her family cannot be identified.  However, Indian media has reported that she was a physiotherapy student who was attacked by six men on a bus.  She died in Singapore hospital, where she was sent for treatment, nearly two weeks after the attack.

In response to this awful crime, President Pranab Mukherjee assented to new laws proposed by cabinet ministers.  According to the new ordinances, the sentences for gang rape or rapes committed by police officers or other persons in authority will be doubled and can be extended to life without parole.   The law also includes a new set of offenses, including voyerism and stalking.  

There has even been discussion of the death penalty for the young woman's attackers.  Although Indian law provides for capital punishment, officials say that it is used "only in the rarest of rare cases". Three months ago, the last surviving gunman of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks was hanged.  It was the first state execution in eight years.

While the new laws, if passed (even without a provision for the death penalty), will punish some rapists more severely than perpetrators of similar crimes have been penalized in the past, women's rights advocates still don't think it goes far enough.  They say that, while the provisions for longer sentences are welcome, the law still doesn't have the teeth to fight sex crimes against women.  Others criticized the government for not holding a public debate or hearing on the law.

According to a defense lawyer, the court will start hearing evidence from witnesses next Tuesday and that verdicts will be handed down "very soon" on five of the perpetrators.  The sixth is being tried in a juvenile court.

More Attempts At Legislative Violence Against Women

I'm normally not much of a fan of increased government regulation.  However, I am disgusted by  the latest efforts to weaken legislation designed to help women.  What's even worse is that such efforts are being made in tandem with attempts to violate our right to the sanctity of our own bodies.


In a previous post, I discussed the drive in several states--most notably Texas--to require a woman who seeks an abortion to be probed, in her vagina, with an ultrasound stick.  Now many of the same lawmakers who support such legislation are behind efforts to prevent the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994.


Those who want to renew the Act also want to broaden its powers to include, among other women, those who live in rural areas and Native American communities, and those who experience violence in same-sex relationships.  They also want to include stalking in the definition of domestic violence.


I can tell you firsthand that being stalked, even electronically, by an ex can have as much an effect as physical battering on your physical health and emotional well-being.  It's a kind of terrorism, when you think about it, because it keeps the stalked person on edge in much the same way that the threat of bombings keeps a society on edge.  The difference is that law enforcement officers and agencies don't take stalking seriously.  (Yes, I know that firsthand, too.) Then again, most of them don't take other kinds of violence against women seriously, either.


As for women in rural areas and Native American communities, they have less access than most other women to the services available to victims of violence, as well as the services to prevent some of them from becoming victims. Such a lack of access has to do with their isolation:  In addition to being far from the centers that offer services, women in those areas also share the isolation women in abusive relationships experience.  One all-too-common side effect of that isolation, which further exacerbates the problems those women face, is poverty.  A woman in such a relationship is likely not to have money or other resources of her own that would allow her to escape such a situation and start life anew someplace else.  Also, if such women have children, they want to take those children with them. That, of course, requires even more money and other resources, including a safe place to which they can go.


Now you might ask, "Why should there be programs for same-sex couples?"  You might not believe this, but even the so-called "helping professions" have their share of deliberately and, more often, unconsciously homophobic practitioners.  There are many other practitioners who simply don't have training for, or experience with, helping LGBT people and don't understand the particular risks-- most of which stem from the stress of living with discrimination in employment, housing and other areas--for domestic violence (and related issues like substance abuse) in the community.  Those problems are further exacerbated by the fact that because same-sex marriage still isn't legal in most states, abused partners often don't have the same venues of recourse and redress that people battered in heterosexual relationships can use.


What really rankles me is that some of the politicians who want to get rid of the Violence Against Women Act, and require doctors to probe the vaginas of women who've been raped and girls who've been incested, frame it as a diversion of money away from "more important" things in the worst economic times since the Great Depression.  If 51 percent of the population can't be as secure within our persons as the other 49 percent, what hope is there of a "recovery" or "improvement" in any other area?