Many readers may be familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the story of an ancient Samarian citizen who stopped his journey to help someone in need, even though the suffering individual was from an ethnic and cultural group who had traditionally hated and oppressed the Samarian people. Today, we tend to summon the story of the Good Samaritan to evoke a general spirit of rendering aid to anyone in need, but we are also now faced with a legal system which in many cases encourages lawsuits and has introduced a fear among many citizens to instinctively pursue their natural desire to act in the aid of others when identifying someone in need.
One recent study conducted by YouGov and commissioned by the Bible Society has produced results which paint a bleak picture for the immediate future of social responsibility and the willingness of citizens to respond to their neighbors in need. In the study conducted across a sampling of almost 3,000 people in the UK, two thirds of the participants worried that Britain is becoming “less kind”, yet when asked if they would help someone crying in the street, “Only 55 per cent said they would do so if it was an elderly lady and 52 per cent said the same of an elderly man. That share falls to just over one in five (20 per cent) if the person crying looked like a homeless man.“ Perhaps more surprising, 1 in 5 (20 per cent) of the participants indicated that they had themselves been in a public place in need of help before and nobody stopped to render aid, suggesting that even those who should be able to most empathize with those in needs may be unwilling to step in when in the role of the observer.
These findings may indicate some psychological barriers to rendering aid, but one factor has certainly been fear of legal repercussions. To counter-act this resistance to what is in itself a noble act, nearly all states in the US – as well as most developed nations – have enacted laws which specifically protect civilians from punitive civil liability brought against them for rendering assistance. The state of Washington, for instance, grants immunity from liability for “(1) Any person, including but not limited to a volunteer provider of emergency or medical services, who without compensation or the expectation of compensation renders emergency care at the scene of an emergency or who participates in transporting, not for compensation, therefrom an injured person or persons for emergency medical treatment shall not be liable for civil damages resulting from any act or omission in the rendering of such emergency care or in transporting such persons, other than acts or omissions constituting gross negligence or willful or wanton misconduct.”, while stipulating that professional, compensated responders acting in their employment are exempt from this protection.
Certainly, increasing awareness of “Good Samaritan Laws” should minimize hesitance when making a decision to act in compassion towards those in our communities, but there are other barriers to response which are even more challenging. Developing nations and progressive communities, however, have at least demonstrated on large social scales that no-one should suppress their human instinct to compassionately help another human for fear of damaging legal consequences.
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