From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a
crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. The study of
victimology seeks to mitigate the perception of victims as responsible. There is a greater tendency to blame victims of
rape than victims of
robbery if victims and perpetrators know each other.
Moynihan had concluded that three centuries of oppression of
black people, and in particular with what he calls the uniquely cruel
structure of
American slavery
as opposed to its Latin American counterparts, had created a long
series of chaotic disruptions within the black family structure which,
at the time of the report, manifested itself in high rates of unwed
births, absent fathers, and
single mother households
in black families. Moynihan then correlated these familial outcomes,
which he considered undesirable, to the relatively poorer rates of
employment, educational achievement, and financial success found among
the black population. Moynihan advocated the implementation of
government programs designed to strengthen the black
nuclear family.
Ryan objected that Moynihan then located the
proximate cause
of the plight of black Americans in the prevalence of a family
structure in which the father was often sporadically, if at all,
present, and the mother was often dependent on government aid to feed,
clothe, and provide medical care for her children. Ryan's critique cast
the Moynihan theories as attempts to divert responsibility for poverty
from
social structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor.
History
Although Ryan popularized the phrase, other scholars had identified the phenomenon of victim blaming.
In 1947
Theodor W. Adorno defined what would be later called "blaming the victim," as "one of the most sinister features of the
Fascist character".
Shortly thereafter Adorno and three other professors at the
University of California, Berkeley formulated their influential and highly debated
F-scale (F for fascist), published in
The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which included among the
fascist traits of the scale the "contempt for everything discriminated against or weak."
A typical expression of victim blaming is the "asking for it" idiom,
e.g. "she was asking for it" said of a victim of violence or sexual
assault.
Secondary victimization of sexual assault victims
Hundreds gathered at the Alberta Legislature grounds in Edmonton to protest against victim blaming
Sexual assault victims experience stigmatization based on
rape myths. A female rape victim is especially
stigmatized in
patrilineal cultures with strong customs and
taboos regarding sex and sexuality. For example, a society may view a female rape victim (especially one who was previously a
virgin) as "damaged". Victims in these cultures may suffer
isolation, physical and psychological
abuse,
slut-shaming,
public humiliation rituals, be disowned by friends and family, be
prohibited from marrying, be divorced if already married, or even be
killed. However, even in many developed countries, including some sectors of United States society,
misogyny remains culturally ingrained.
One example of a
sexist allegation against female victims of sexual assault is that
wearing provocative clothing stimulates sexual aggression in men who believe that women wearing body-revealing clothes are
actively trying to seduce a sexual partner. Such accusations against victims stem from the assumption that sexually revealing clothing conveys
consent for sexual actions, irrespective of willful verbal
consent. Research has yet to prove that attire is a significant causal factor in determining who is assaulted.
Victim blaming is also exemplified when a victim of sexual assault is found at fault for
performing actions which reduce their ability to resist or refuse consent, such as consuming alcohol.
Victim advocacy groups and medical professionals are educating young
adults on the definition of consent, and the importance of refraining
from victim blaming. Most institutions have adopted the concept of
affirmative consent and that refraining from sexual activity while under the influence is the safest choice.
In efforts to discredit alleged sexual assault victims in court, a defense attorney may delve into an accuser's personal history,
a common practice that also has the purposeful effect of making the
victim so uncomfortable they choose not to proceed. This attack on
character, especially one pointing out promiscuity, makes the argument
that women who lead "high risk" lifestyles (promiscuity, drug use) are
not real victims of rape.
Findings on Rape Myth Acceptance have supported feminist claims that
sexism is at the root of female rape victim blaming.
A 2009 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence of male
victims of sexual assault concludes that male rape victim blaming is
usually done so because of
social constructs of masculinity.
Some effects of these kind of rape cases include a loss of masculinity,
confusion about their sexual orientation, and a sense of failure in
behaving as men should.
Victims of an unwanted sexual encounter usually develop psychological problems such as depression or sexual violence specific
PTSD known as
rape trauma syndrome.
Ideal victim
An
ideal victim is one who is afforded the status of victimhood due to
unavoidable circumstances that put the individual at a disadvantage. One
can apply this theory to any crime including and especially sexual
assault. Nils Christie, a Norwegian criminology professor, has been
theorizing about the concept of the ideal victim since the 1980s. In his
research he gives two examples, one of an old woman who is attacked on
her way home from visiting her family and the other of a man who is
attacked at a bar by someone he knew. He describes the old woman as an
ideal victim because she could not avoid being in the location that she
was, she did not know her attacker, and she could not fight off her
attacker. The man, however, could have avoided being at a bar, knew his
attacker, and should have been able to fight off his attacker, being
younger and a man.
When applying the ideal victim theory to sexual assault victims,
often judicial proceedings define an ideal victim as one who resists
their attacker and exercises caution in risky situations, despite law
reforms to extinguish these fallacious requirements.
When victims are not ideal they are at risk for being blamed for their
attack because they are not considered real victims of rape. Because
they do not fit the criteria being laid out in the rape law, they cannot
be considered real victims and thereby their attacker will not be
prosecuted.
A victim who is not considered an ideal, or real victim, is one
who leads a "high risk" lifestyle, partaking in drugs or alcohol, or is
perceived as promiscuous. A victim who intimately knows their attacker
is also not considered an ideal victim. Examples of a sexual assault
victim who is not ideal is a prostitute because they lead a high risk
lifestyle. The perception is that these behaviors discount the
credibility of a sexual assault victim's claim or that the behaviors and
associations create the mistaken assumption of consent. Some of or all
of the blame of the assault is then placed on these victims, and so they
are not worthy of having their case presented in court. These
perceptions persist in court rulings despite a shift in laws favoring
affirmative consent- meaning that the participants in a sexual activity
give a verbal affirmation rather than one participant who neither
answers negatively nor positively. In other words, affirmative consent
is yes means yes and no means no.
In addition to an ideal victim, there must be an ideal
perpetrator for a crime to be considered ideal. The ideal attacker does
not know their victim and is a completely non-sympathetic figure- one
who is considered sub-human, an individual lacking morals. An attacker
that knows their victim is not considered an ideal attacker, nor is
someone who seems morally ordinary.
Cases of intimate partner violence are not considered ideal because the
victim knows their attacker. Husbands and wives are not ideal victims
or perpetrators because they are intimately familiar with each other.
Global situation
Many
different cultures across the globe have formulated different degrees
of victim blaming for different scenarios such as rape, hate crimes, and
domestic abuse. Victim blaming is common around the world, especially
in cultures where it is socially acceptable and advised to treat certain
groups of people as lesser. For example, in Somalia victims of sexual
abuse consistently endure social
ostracization and harassment.
One specific example is the kidnapping and rape of 14-year old Fatima:
when the police arrived, both Fatima and her rapist were arrested. While
they did not detain the offender for long, the officers held Fatima
captive for a month and a prison guard continually raped her during that
time.
In February 2016, the organisations
International Alert and
UNICEF published a study revealing that girls and women released from captivity by
Nigeria's insurgency group
Boko Haram often face rejection by their communities and families. Their children born of sexual violence faced even more discrimination.
Acid attacks on South Asian women, when people throw acid on
women in an attempt to punish them for their perceived wrongdoings, are
another example of victim-blaming. For instance, in New Delhi in 2005, a
group of men threw acid on a 16-year-old girl because they believed she
provoked the advances of a man.
In Chinese culture, victim blaming is often associated with the crime
of rape, as women are expected to resist rape using physical force.
Thus, if rape occurs, it is considered to be at least partly the women’s
fault and her virtue is inevitably called into question.
In western culture victim blaming has been largely recognized as a
problematic way to view a situation, however this does not exempt
westerners from being guilty of the action. A recent example of western
victim blaming would be a civil trial held in 2013 where the Los Angeles
School District blamed a 14-year-old girl for the sexual abuse she
endured from her middle school teacher. The District's lawyer argued
that the minor was responsible for the prevention of the abuse, putting
the entire fault on the victim and exempting the perpetrator of any
responsibility. Despite his efforts to convince the court that the
victim must be blamed, the ruling stated that no minor student that has
been sexually assaulted by his or her teacher is responsible for the
prevention of that sexual assault.
Opposing views
Roy Baumeister,
a social and personality psychologist, argued that blaming the victim
is not necessarily always fallacious. He argued that showing the
victim's possible role in an altercation may be contrary to typical
explanations of violence and cruelty, which incorporate the trope of the
innocent victim. According to Baumeister, in the classic telling of
"the myth of pure evil," the innocent, well-meaning victims are going
about their business when they are suddenly assaulted by wicked,
malicious evildoers. Baumeister describes the situation as a possible
distortion by both the perpetrator and the victim; the perpetrator may
minimize the offense while the victim maximizes it, and so accounts of
the incident shouldn't be immediately taken as objective truths.
In context, Baumeister refers to the common behavior of the
aggressor seeing themselves as more of the "victim" than the abused,
justifying a horrific act by way of their "moral complexity". This
usually stems from an "excessive sensitivity" to insults, which he finds
as a consistent pattern in abusive husbands. Essentially, the abuse the
perpetrator administers is generally excessive, in comparison to the
act/acts that they claim as to have provoked them.
Horseshoe theory and nonpolarized views
Some
scholars make the argument that some of the attitudes that are
described as victim blaming and the victimologies that are said to
counteract them are both extreme and similar to each other, an example
of the
horseshoe theory.
For instance, they argue that the claim that "women wearing provocative
clothing cause rape" is as demeaning to men as it is to women as
depicting men as incapable of controlling their sexual desire is
misandrist and denies men full agency, while also arguing that the
generalization that women do not lie about rape (or any generalization
about women not doing some things because of their gender) is misogynist
by its implicit assumption that women act by simple default action
modes which is incompatible with full agency. These scholars argue that
it is important to impartially assess the evidence in each criminal
trial individually and that any generalization based on statistics would
change the situation from one where the control of evidence makes false
reporting difficult to one where lack of individual control of the
alleged crime makes it easier to file false reports and that statistics
collected in the former situation would not be possible to apply to the
latter situation. While the scholars make a distinction between actual
victim blaming and
rule by law
that they consider to be falsely lumped with victim blaming in radical
feminist rhetoric, they also advocate more protection from ad hominem
questions to alleged victims about past life history and that the
questions should focus on what is relevant for the specific alleged
crime. They also cite examples that they consider to be cases of the
horseshoe theory applied to the question of victim blaming. This
includes cases in which psychologists who have testified on behalf of
the prosecution in trials in which breast size have been used as a
measure of female age when classifying pornographic cartoons as child
pornography and been praised praised by feminists for it, and later the
same psychologists have used the same psychological arguments when
testifying on behalf of the defense in statutory rape cases and getting
the defendant acquitted by claiming that the victim's breasts looked
like those of an adult woman (considered by these scholars to be victim
blaming based on appearance) and been praised by men's rights groups for
it. It also includes the possibility that biopsychiatric models that
consider sexual criminality hereditary and that are advocated by some
feminists may blame victims of incest abuse for being genetically
related to their abusers and thereby dissuading them from reporting
abuse.
Other analysts of victim blaming discourse who neither support
most of the phenomena that are described as victim blaming nor most of
the measures that are marketed as countermeasures against such point at
the existence of other ways of discovering and punishing crimes with
victims besides the victim reporting the crime. Not only are there
police patrols and possible eyewitnesses, but these analysts also argue
that neighbors can overhear and report crimes that take place within the
house such as
domestic violence.
For that reason along with the possibility of many witnesses turning up
over time if the crime is ongoing long term as domestic abuse is
generally said to be which would make some of the witnesses likely to be
considered believable, analysts of this camp of thought argue that the
main problem that prevent crimes from being successfully prosecuted is
offender profiling that disbelieve the capacity and/or probability of
many criminals to commit the crime, rather than disbelief or blaming of
victim reports. These analysts cite international comparisons that show
that the percentage of male on female cases in the statistics of
successfully prosecuted domestic violence is not higher in countries
that apply gender feminist theories about patriarchal structures than in
countries that apply supposedly anti-feminist evolutionary psychology
profiling of sex differences in aggressiveness, impulse control and
empathy, arguing that the criminal justice system prioritizing cases in
which they believe the suspect most likely to be guilty makes
evolutionary psychology at least as responsible as gender feminism for
leaving domestic violence cases with female offenders undiscovered no
matter if the victim is male or female. The analysts argue that many
problems that are often attributed to victim blaming are instead due to
offender profiling, and suggest randomized investigations instead of
psychological profiling of suspected offenders.
Examples
Leigh Leigh, born Leigh Rennea Mears, was a 14-year-old girl from
Fern Bay, Australia, who was murdered on November 3, 1989. While attending a 16-year-old boy's birthday party at
Stockton Beach,
Leigh was assaulted by a group of boys after she returned distressed
from a sexual encounter on the beach that a reviewing judge later called
non-consensual. After being kicked and spat on by the group, Leigh left
the party. Her naked body was found in the sand dunes nearby the
following morning, with severe genital damage and a crushed skull.
Leigh's murder received considerable attention in the media. Initially
focusing on her sexual assault and murder, media attention later
concentrated more on the lack of parental supervision and the drugs and
alcohol at the party, and on Leigh's sexuality. The media coverage of
the murder has been cited as an example of victim blaming.
In a case that became infamous in 2011, an 11-year-old female rape victim who suffered repeated
gang rapes in
Cleveland, Texas, was accused by a defense attorney of being a seductress who lured men to their doom. "Like
the spider and the fly. Wasn't she saying, 'Come into my parlor', said the spider to the fly?", he asked a witness. The
New York Times
ran an article uncritically reporting on the way many in the community
blamed the victim, for which the newspaper later apologized.
In a case that attracted worldwide coverage, when
a woman was raped and killed in Delhi
in December 2012, some Indian government officials and political
leaders blamed the victim for various things, mostly based on
conjecture. Many of the people involved later apologized.
In recent years, the issue of victim blaming has gained notoriety
and become widely recognized in the media, particularly in the context
of feminism, as women have often been blamed for behaving in ways that
encourage harassment.
In 2016, in the wake of
New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany, the
mayor of Cologne Henriette Reker came under heavy criticism, as her response appeared to blame the victims. She called for women to follow a "
code of conduct," including staying at an "arm's length" from strangers. By the evening of January 5,
#einearmlänge ("an arm's length") became one of Germany's top-trending hashtags on
Twitter. Reker called a crisis meeting with the police in response to the incidents. Reker called it "completely improper" to link the perpetrators to refugees.
Coverage of the 2016
Murder of Ashley Ann Olsen,
an American murdered in Italy during a sexual encounter with a
Senegalese immigrant, focused on the victim blaming in cross-cultural
encounters.
In August 2017, the hashtag #AintNoCinderella took over the media
in response to a national instance of victim-blaming occurring in
India. After Varnika Kundu was stalked and harassed by two men on her
way home late at night, Vice President Ramveer Bhatti addressed the viral story with a claim
that Kundu was somehow at fault for being out late by herself. He
essentially blamed the a woman for an incident of which she was merely a
victim; and social media users took to Twitter and Instagram to
challenge this idea that women should not be out late at night, and if
they do, they are somehow "asking for it". Hundreds of women shared
photos of themselves staying out past midnight, dressing boldly, and
behaving in (harmless) ways that tend to be condemned in old-fashioned,
anti-feminist ideology in order to make the statement:
I am not a child. I am not someone's property. I am not a seventeeth-century fantastical damsel in distress. I am a woman.
