Victim blaming

Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially responsible 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 in cases where victims and perpetrators know one another.

Coining of the phrase; racism

William Ryan coined the phrase "blaming the victim" in his 1971 book Blaming the Victim. In the book, Ryan described victim blaming as an ideology used to justify racism and social injustice against black people in the United States. Ryan wrote the book to refute Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 work The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (usually simply referred to as the Moynihan Report).

Moynihan had concluded that three centuries of horrible treatment at the hands of whites, and in particular 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

Secondary victimization is the re-traumatization of the sexual assault, abuse, or rape victim through the responses of individuals and institutions. Types of secondary victimization include victim blaming, disbelieving the victim's story, minimizing the severity of the attack, and inappropriate post-assault treatment by medical personnel or other organizations. Secondary victimization is especially common in cases of drug-facilitated, acquaintance, military sexual trauma and statutory rape.

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 the United States, misogyny remains culturally ingrained.

One example of a sexism-based 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 faulted for performing actions which reduce the victim's ability to resist, or refuse consent, such as consuming alcohol. Victims 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.

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 surveys on male victims of sexual assault states that male rape victim blaming is usually done so because of social constructs of masculinity. The article quotes "A man who fails to physically overcome his attacker is likewise seen as contributing to his own victimization; he must have secretly wanted it." 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.

Media

From magazines to TV shows, victim blaming is spread as an acceptable response to a person’s uncontrollable circumstance. Biased sources will take a victim’s situation and hold them responsible for what happened and then broadcast this opinion to their viewers. Media outlets have the ability to influence a large population’s view on a person’s situation. The media and pop culture helps to feed the ideas behind rape culture and therefore deserves representation in the topic of victim blaming since it is itself a branch of rape culture.

In covering the Steubenville High School rape case where two high school boys raped a 16 year old girl, CNN portrayed the boys as “very good students” with “promising futures.” The news anchor even went so far as to say that it will “haunt them for the rest of their lives.” The way CNN presented the rape made is seem like the victim was the one in the wrong and the two boys did not deserve the punishment for their crime. When covering the same case, ABC News tried to rationalize the rape by saying that the rapist was in a “celebratory mood.” ABC also focused more on how awful it was that the rape was caught on video rather than the actual rape itself. NBC News also concentrated on the “promising football careers” of the rapists and how it will not look good that they are now registered sex offenders. Yahoo News described the victim as “an intoxicated 16-year-old girl” who forced the town into an emotional situation.

Global perspective

Societal attitudes towards victim blaming are not universal. Many different cultures across the globe have formulated different degrees of victim blaming for different scenarios such as rape, hate crimes, and domestic abuse. 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 Districts’ 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.

In other parts of the world, victim blaming is much more widely accepted. In some cultures victims are seen as deserving of their suffering because of that cultures perception of what is right and wrong. This is especially true 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 example is the kidnapping and rape of 14-year old Fatima. When the police arrived, both Fatima and her rapist were arrested. Instead of detaining the offender, the officers held Fatima captive and continually raped her for a month. Another example of the effects of global victim blaming would be the acid attacks on Indian women. People will throw acid on women in an attempt to punish them for their perceived wrong doings. 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.

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.

Examples

In 2008, 13 year old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, a resident of Kismayo, Somalia, was murdered by the jihadist militant group Al-Shabaab. The young girl was charged and summarily executed for adultery, according to Sharia law, after attempting to bring charges against her rapists.

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 India in December 2012, some Indian government officials and political leaders blamed the victim for various things, mostly based in conjecture. Many of the people involved later apologized.

In 2015, a British judge described a woman as "very unwise" for drinking too much prior to being raped by two men, noting that she had been 'throwing herself at a number of young men'. He nonetheless particularly faulted the convicted men for taking of advantage of someone who was 'vulnerable and defenseless'.

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.

See also

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References

• Cole, Alyson Manda (2007) The cult of true victimhood: from the war on welfare to the war on terror
• Downs, Donald Alexander (1998) More Than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law
• Kirkpatrick, George R. and Katsiaficas, George N. and Kirkpatrick, Robert George and Emery, Mary Lou (1987) Introduction to critical sociology
• Robinson, Daniel N. (2002) Praise And Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications

External links

• Ofer Zur – Rethinking 'Don't Blame the Victim': The Psychology of Victimhood
• Victim Blame and Sexual Assault