When I started researching this post on victim blaming I found a lot of stuff on the #metoo movement and rape culture. But victim blaming in America goes waaaaay beyond that. Too often when someone is going through a traumatizing event rather than offer empathy and support we blame the person for what they are going through. Victim-blaming is the tendency for people from scientists and doctors to law enforcement and your average Joanne to place individual responsibility for an illness, an accident, or a crime on the individual attitudes, behaviours, and lifestyle choices of the victim. Western culture exacerbates this error, as we emphasize individual freedom and autonomy and are socialized to prefer dispositional factors to situational ones. Both public health and social science research indicates that while what we do matters outcomes are determined by an assemblage of factors including the social, the economic, and just plain luck.
The propensity to blame people for their circumstances, good and bad, permeates every aspect of American culture. It’s not just explicitly accusing someone of failing to prevent whatever disaster has befallen them. Laura Niemi, a postdoctoral student in psychology at Duke University, notes that the process of victim blaming is usually implicit. Any time we default to questioning what someone could have done differently to prevent a crime, avoid an illness, or any unfortunate event, we are victim-blaming. Even when we only think it to ourselves. God knows I am guilty of this. Nowadays it mostly happens only inside my head but in my younger years responding with “What were they thinking?!?” when hearing of someone else’s misfortune was almost my go to reaction.
Now I will recognize that acknowledging the things we could do to avoid misfortune is not, in of itself, a bad thing. For example, fraud prevention that focuses on teaching people not to give personal information on the phone or social media. Or a rape prevention campaign that includes things women, people, should do to keep ourselves safe is common sense. The problem is that too often that’s where those rape prevention campaigns end. Thus implying that it’s the would be victim’s job to prevent themselves from being raped rather than the rapist’s responsibility not to, you know, be a fucking rapist.
Blaming people for their misfortune can cause psychological trauma. In an interview in U.S. News Dr. Anju Hurria, a psychologist and assistant clinical professor at the University of California-Irvine noted that victim blaming is a form of secondary trauma. She says that people who experience victim blaming experience “greater distress, increased amounts of depression; [it] usually complicates their post-traumatic stress disorder, if they’re experiencing that, because they’re dealing with two different assaults.” So, why do we do it?
The reasons are many. In some ways, it is a natural psychological reaction to adverse situations. Especially for those of us who would like to believe we live in a world that is fair. The preference for fairness is almost universal among human children. One with predictable stages of development though there is some cultural variance. The idea of fairness is an integral part of the development of human understanding of how the social world operates and, as such, it guides our behavior from very early on.
Sherry Hamby, founding editor of the APA’s Psychology of Violence journal and professor of psychology at the University of the South, says “I think the biggest factor that promotes victim-blaming is something called the just world hypothesis.” First formulated by Melvin Lerner in the early 1960s, the just-world bias can be seen in any situation in which victims are blamed for their own misfortune, whether it be abuse, sexual assault, crime, or poverty. She continues, “It’s this idea that people deserve what happens to them. There’s just a really strong need to believe that we all deserve our outcomes and consequences.”
This is a Deterministic belief or the idea that everything happens as it should. Knowing that things are meant to be can be a way to give meaning to our lives. This desire to see the world as just and fair may be even stronger among people in the US. On top of the fact that as humans our brains crave predictability and loathe uncertainty we Americans are raised in a culture that promotes the American Dream and the idea that we all control our own destinies. The just world bias happens because we would rather blame victims of unfairness in preference to rejecting the comforting notion that good will be rewarded and evil punished.
Thus we hold victims responsible for their misfortune as a partial way to avoid admitting that even if we do everything “right” something just as unbearable could happen to us. The flip side is that people to whom good things
Part of this deep-seated need to see the world as fair, despite the fact that is often and obviously not so, comes from the fact that many of life’s rewards are delayed. After all, good things come to those who wait. These beliefs hold the uncertainty at bay and make us feel like we have control. They can make us feel as though we have the power to find the pattern, predict things, and ultimately control things. They can make us feel confident and give us the strength to face the unknowable of what tomorrow will bring. To invest in the now in the hope of payoff in a nebulous future.
In Lerner’s original experiments women were asked to observe what appeared to be learning by punishment. The learner, an actor, was punished with painful electric shocks when she gave a wrong answer. Afterward, the observers were asked to describe how they felt about the victim rating her in categories like morality and likability. Initially,
The other group of women is subdivided and told a variety of different stories about the victim: That she was an unpaid volunteer. That she is a well-compensated volunteer. And finally the martyr scenario, in which the victim is literally sacrificing herself for the group. The stories powerfully influence how the women see the victim. As the suffering continues and observers remain powerless to interfere, the women begin to tear down the victim. The greater the suffering the greater the derogation. More, the less material compensation the group thought the victim received the more denigration was heaped upon her with the victim in the martyr scenario receiving the most scorn.
Lerner’s conclusion was: “The sight of an innocent person suffering without possibility of reward or compensation motivated people to devalue the attractiveness of the victim in order to bring about a more appropriate fit between her fate and her character.” As Laura Niemi puts it. “The derogation of the victim comes as a defensive reaction against [one’s] personal worldview unraveling.” Several duplications of these experiments have shown that the more blameless the victim the more the victim is devalued. Studies by others on things as varied as poverty to maternal deaths have since supported these ideas. It’s not just seeing innocent people suffer, it’s also the fact that the observers feel powerless to save the victim. If we can’t change what is happening to the victim we can change our perception of her as a victim.
People with a powerful affinity to believe that the world is just are likely to demonstrate particular attributes. They admire the powerful, from political leaders to heads of industry, and existing social institutions. They tend to be both more religious and more authoritarian. On the
The problems start when we encounter problems that we feel we can’t fix. They are too big, too systemic, or we are too powerless to help. To fight. In these cases, Lerner’s work illustrates people’s eagerness to convince themselves that the powerful, from political leaders to heads of industry, and existing social institutions deserve their power and those society has left behind deserve their
As I wrote in Patterns for some people a Deterministic attitude, a belief in a just world, makes it easier to assume that forces beyond their control mete out justice. We see those who have achieved success as deserving of it and we see the victim as deserving of her fate. Even when the victim is us. As people we need to feel that we are in control of our lives even when our lives are shit. Perhaps especially when our lives are shit. To do otherwise would be to accept how big a role uncertainty, random chance, plays in our lives and that, ladies and gentleman is scary as hell. It takes some difficult cognitive work to accept that bad things sometimes happen to good people, wonderful things happen to terrible people; that good people do bad things and bad people are capable of good things; and that most of us are experiencing some combination of all of the above at any given time. So instead we question victims’ motives, we question their character, we question their bad decisions, we push them away and make them THEM in an effort to protect us.
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