At a Hollywood party in 1921 an actress dies during an encounter with film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Christian leaders of the time censure Arbuckle, but they also attack Hollywood, alcohol, and the victim who, deceased, is unable to defend herself. The victim is demonized to the extent that Arbuckle’s lawyers are able to sell a jury on the idea that she was a wanton seductress who enticed a good man, a manly man, with her wicked ways. Two juries hang before a third not only acquits him but goes so far as to offer Arbuckle a formal apology.
In Florida in I989 a young woman is kidnapped and raped at knifepoint. Her assailant is captured but found not guilty by a jury of his peers. According to them, her choice of ensemble was an advertisement, a request, to be taken against her will, attacked with a deadly weapon, and sexually violated.
In the early aughts a young woman is at a college party off campus. There is alcohol at the party and she indulges. Falling asleep she awakens to find herself being sexually assaulted. She reports the assault to her conservative Christian school and is told that she is at fault for drinking. For sinning. Her counseling centers on her actions, shaming her for allowing herself to be in that situation.
In Ireland in November of 2018 a twenty-seven year old man is found not guilty of the rape of a seventeen year old girl. The defense team enters the teenager’s underwear, a lace thong, as evidence that the encounter was consensual. The defense attorney says, “You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.”
At a birthday party when I was nine we are playing house. The birthday girl, just turning six, is the child and her cousin, a boy of about thirteen, and I are her parents. She demands that we kiss. Dutifully, I give the boy, whom I do not know, a peck on the cheek. He scoffs and says, “That’s not a real kiss!” Grabbing my arms he forces his lips on mine and thrusts his tongue into my mouth. It is over before I can can even begin to process it.
This was my first kiss. Even at nine I knew that something was wrong. Even at nine I’d absorbed that it was somehow my fault. So, I told no one. But I did write about it in my diary. It was a tiny, white book with gold edged pages. It didn’t occur to me to hide it. A few days later I was getting into the car with my mom. I was in the back seat and met her eyes in the rearview mirror. I remember exactly how the conversation started. She said, “I read your diary and I’m not going to apologize for it.” She continued that I shouldn’t write such stories or people would get the wrong idea.
That’s how I learned that when you are violated the people who love you will violate you further to protect you. To protect themselves. That’s why when it, or something like it, happened again (and again, and again) I told no one. By the time I was in high school I decided if I was ever raped, you know, rape raped, not just a boy going farther than I wanted him to or touching me in way I didn’t like. If I was ever really raped I would kill the guy. Because at thirteen I decided that I would rather be tried as a murderer than a rape victim.
There are so many of these stories that it is easy to understand why when people think of victim blaming our thoughts automatically go to sexual assault. This is complicated by the fact that, like all crimes, the perpetrators of sexual assault are often people we know. When the rapist is a spiritual leader, a teacher, a friend, a parent, or a sibling it can be hard for a community to reconcile the act with the person. In some cases, in a particularly warped form of denial, it can lead to people connecting more with the perpetrators than with their victims.
However, the problem of victim blaming is bigger than sex crimes. Those who are predisposed to victim-blame do so regardless of what misery: crime, illness, or even natural disaster, may have befallen their targets. Survivors of rape and sexual assault are asked about what they wore and why they didn’t fight harder. People who are victims of domestic violence are asked what they did to provoke their partners.
The stigma, that poisonous combination of blame and shame, associated with mental illness discourages us from seeking out help. Our culture routinely wounds people with mental health issues by questioning the seriousness of our disorders and the authenticity of our struggles. It’s not depression, we are told. It’s a simple lack of willpower. They tell us we need to just try harder to get over it. Don’t even get me started on the difficulty of finding help even when we are actively looking. If we are outside of the white, straight norm finding a culturally competent clinician becomes infinitely more difficult. People have a lot of opinions on the choices that mentally ill make but on the systemic issues we face folks are disturbingly silent.
It’s not just mental illness. Victim blaming is present throughout our healthcare systems. The US has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the developed world yet at least thirty out of our fifty states have not even bothered to try to figure out why so many women are dying during what should be a routine and natural process. State medical committees instead focus on the assumed actions of the dead women: that they smoked, didn’t get prenatal care, were too old, or too fat. In place of researching the problem we blame mothers for their own deaths.
Speaking of too fat, the obesity epidemic has been going on in the US for over thirty years. In that time it has spread far beyond our borders. In Fool Me Twice I wrote about how shame infiltrates us, twisting our self-perceptions and turning us into our own judge, juries, and executioners. Fat shaming is nothing more or less than a form of bullying. Yet, in defiance of all the evidence that bullying and victim blaming not only do not work to motivate anyone to do anything much less lose weight. That shaming actually causes people to gain more weight, it remains a deeply entrenched aspect of American and many other societies, including in our healthcare systems.
We also blame people for being poor. In his now infamous rant actor Craig T Nelson said, “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.” Nelson’s cognitive dissonance as illustrated on Glen Beck almost a decade ago. The just world belief that everything gotten, good or bad, is earned even when faced with stark proof to the contrary. Acknowledging the systemic nature of poverty (or racism, or criminal justice issues…), admitting that poor people are facing an economy that is stacked against them means owning responsibility in a system we are all a part of.
This makes people not just uncomfortable but resentful. It’s easier to believe, as Yahoo Billionaire Kenneth “Ken” Goldman does, that all we have has come from our own blood, sweat, and tears. Therefore, others lack such material wealth not due to systemic issues or the random vagaries of fate but because they are deficient in the internal resources to make it happen. As Goldman says, “I was educated. Everything I got was earned. Nothing was given to me. No hand-me-downs. I earned it. How did I earn it? I went to school; I earned my way up.” He adds, in a let them eat cake quote for the twenty teens, “I can tell you, driving an Uber is better than no job.”
There are people who work three jobs and still struggle to support a family. People who work up to ninety (90!) hours a week, sometimes even with the same company, and still get no benefits. No vacation, no retirement, no sick leave, no health insurance, and because all of their jobs are “part time” they may not even be eligible for unemployment. This lack of protection leaves them incredibly vulnerable to one bad thing: an accident, an illness, the loss of one of their jobs, even a speeding ticket they can’t afford, throwing them into the abyss. The response to this problem is, “Get a better job!” This illustrates one of the problems with thinking good things only happen to good people. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I could go on and on. We victim blame students by telling them they just need to have more grit. We victim blame teachers in so many ways it’s a whole other blog post. The survivors of the Parkland School Shooting were victim shamed about how they attempted to protect themselves. Told that they, children who were being shot at, needed to do a better job of reporting threats or calling for help. The victim blaming associated with racism is boundless and varied. Hell, we even victim blame bicyclists. Bicyclists get the same rules as the other vehicles on the road but nothing on the road is designed for them. We impose the burdens of safety on the cyclists themselves. When accidents happen because of this design flaw the bicyclists are blamed rather than a system that doesn’t teach people to watch out for cyclists or provide space for their reality.
The fact that our societies have a tendency to assign the responsibility to the victims for their victimization is seen everywhere from our governmental systems to our media. The media misattribution of blame creates the impression that the victim’s misfortune is the fault of the victim’s race, gender, or other external label that has been placed upon them by society. This challenges the findings of attribution research in psychology and anthropology. More, how we see and understand real events is far more complex than what a scientist may see in a controlled laboratory setting. On top of this, polarizing times can create ideological environments in which people perform mental contortions so as not have their core beliefs (and prejudices) challenged. This can lead to everything from simple denial to the most outrageous of conspiracy theories.
From the Flat Earthers to Alex Jones’ promotion of Pizzagate modern society is awash with conspiracy theories. Many of them are relativity benign; those who believe the Apollo moon landings were faked, for example, harm no one but themselves. Others, like the pernicious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are downright deadly. These theories, among other things, are a way of making sense of a world in the midst of major changes and awash in information and propaganda. Ultimately, conspiracy theories are born of an idea of a just, or at least ordered, world combined the cui bono, “To whom is it a benefit?”, principle.
Many of these theories go even further than victim blaming. They deny that the victims exist all. This usually goes one of two ways. In cases from the 7/7 bombs in London to the Sandy Hook truthers theorists postulate that these events never actually happened. They were shams using actors and fake blood. The other way, seen from the church bombings during the fight against Jim Crow to the more recent bombs sent to prominent Democrats, is that the people involved are doing this to themselves. In both lines of thought the idea is that they were orchestrated by the powers that be for political reasons. It’s a form of denial that returns to us a feeling of control and protects us from having to deal with victims at all.
People with binding values are more likely than those with individualizing values to victim blame. Because binding values are imperative to keeping societies stable most of us have a blend of both. 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. And they are more likely to victim blame. Conspiracy theories are more frequently held by people who feel powerless: politically, economically, or both. Especially when in an emotionally challenging environment. Uncertainty is more stressful than knowing something bad is going to happen. There is a biological urge to reduce uncertainty at almost any cost. Negative defense mechanisms like victim blaming often come to play when we feel powerless, when we feel our voice is being silenced. The reactions we have, the answers we choose, tend to be those that pacify us or that blend into our ethos. Add this to our natural hypocrisy, how we asses our own behavior using situational attribution but others’ behavior using intrinsic attribution (FAE), and we cast other people into roles: liar, thief, hero, or whore.
The idea of fairness is an integral part of the development of human understanding of how the social world operates. We have a strong need to believe that we all deserve our outcomes and consequences. The belief in a just world, in a power making sure that things turn out the right way, holds the uncertainty at bay and make us feel like we have control. This Deterministic belief or the idea that everything happens as it should. It guides our behavior from very early on. This allows us to focus on the actions of the individual. To question what they did to deserve what happened to them. To default to focusing on what someone could have done differently to prevent a crime, avoid an illness, or any unfortunate event. Seeing innocent people get hurt, being hurt, with no resolution of the situation violates our sense of the world as fair. It makes us feel powerless. It makes us feel insecure. It makes us question. It enrages us. We need to send that anger somewhere and too often rather than her circumstances or, in the case of criminal activity, the perpetrator, we instead blame the victim.
Victim blaming leads to internalized prejudice with devastating consequences. It feeds discrimination, which means people are denied access to care, to jobs, to housing, and more. It not only contributes to abuse, it is a form of abuse. A secondary trauma inflicted on someone already in pain. And it is something that many of us struggle with. The line between empowering someone and blaming them is more delicate than most of us realize. Western culture exacerbates this error, as we emphasize individual freedom and autonomy and are socialized to prefer dispositional factors to situational ones. As a result people, from our doctors, our police officers, our scientists, tend to place sole responsibility for an illness, a crime, even a natural disaster, on an individual’s attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyle choices. This despite the fact that victim-blaming is inconsistent with the cumulative compilation of public health and social science research. What happens to us is determined by a hodgepodge of factors, including the social, the economic, and just plain luck.
Victim blaming comes from deep inside our lizard brains and is based in fundamental values. At its root, victim blaming stems in part from a combination of failure to empathize with victims and fear. Reorientation of this predisposition is possible. Studies show it to be to some extent flexible, vulnerable to slight alterations in language. Small changes in the way we think; focusing less on victims and more on perpetrators, for example. It just isn’t easy. However, the two things that illicit the most change in those who are prone to victim blaming are empathy and gratitude. Being open to seeing the world from a different perspective than our own. An action step may be that when we find ourselves becoming indignant towards someone for a judgement we are making about them, try to make a list of five positive qualities the person also has to help balance out our view. A more forceful measure is to take control.
We are more likely to victim blame when we are afraid or uncertain- when we feel powerless. Instead of abandoning free will to a deterministic fate we can accept the real role of randomness in our lives. Meaning is an idea we create within our own minds. When judging ourselves and the people around us, this acceptance that not all is not in our control, has momentous implications for fairness and for justice. Advocate, instruct, and increase awareness of the conditions and issues that tend to spawn a victim blaming attitude. There is power in this. We can take that power and advocate on behalf of others. Educate ourselves and the public about poverty, abuse, violence, racism, mental illness- the things that cause suffering. Expose ourselves to their stories. When we listen to people and focus on them. When we become aware of their feelings and not just our own. When we ask questions that will help in understanding. This is when we begin to see others as whole people rather than one or two dimensional constructs.
Sources
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http://mammiddleagedmama.com/index.php/2019/02/08/fool-me-once/
http://mammiddleagedmama.com/index.php/2019/02/15/shame-on-you/