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Victim blaming

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Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act are held entirely or partially responsible for the transgressions committed against them.

People familiar with victimology are much less likely to see the victim as responsible.[1] There is a greater tendency to blame victims of rape than victims of robbery in cases where victims and perpetrators know one another.[2]

Coining of the phrase; Racism

William Ryan coined the phrase "blaming the victim" in his 1971 book Blaming the Victim.[3][4][5][6][7] In the book, Ryan described victim blaming as an ideology used to justify racism and social injustice against black people in the United States.[6] 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.[8][9]

The phrase "blaming the victim" was quickly adopted by advocates for crime victims, in particular rape victims accused of abetting their victimization (see Victimology), although this usage is conceptually distinct from the sociological critique developed by Ryan.[citation needed]

History

Although Ryan popularized the phrase, the phenomenon of victim blaming is well established in human psychology and history;[10] for instance there are plenty of examples in the Christian and Ebraic Old Testament, in which tragedies and catastrophes are justified and blamed on the victims for their faults as sinners.[10]

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".[11][12] 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."[13] 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.[14]

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 responsibility 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. Baumestier 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. [15]

Secondary victimization of sexual assault victims

A rape victim is especially stigmatized in cultures with strong customs and taboos regarding sex and sexuality. For example, society may view a rape victim (especially one who was previously a virgin) as "damaged". Victims in these cultures may suffer isolation, be disowned by friends and family, be prohibited from marrying, be divorced if already married, or even killed. This phenomenon is known as secondary victimization.[16]

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 and inappropriate post-assault behavior or language by medical personnel or other organizations with which the victim has contact.[17] Secondary victimization is especially common in cases of drug-facilitated, acquaintance, military sexual trauma and statutory rape.

Rape shield laws

Main article: Rape shield law

In the United States and Canada, rape is unique in that it is the only crime in which there are statutory protections designed in favor of the accuser. These were enacted in response to the common defense tactic of "putting the accuser on trial". Typical rape shield laws prohibit cross-examination of the accuser (alleged victim) with respect to certain issues, such as her or his prior sexual history, or the manner in which she or he was dressed at the time of the rape. Most states and the federal rules, however, provide exceptions to the rape shield law where evidence of prior sexual history is used to provide an alternative explanation for physical evidence, where the defendant and the alleged victim had a prior consensual sexual relationship, and where exclusion of evidence would violate the defendant's constitutional rights.[citation needed]

Examples

In 2005, Australian Muslim preacher Feiz Mohammad gave a speech in Australia that was covered in Europe and the U.S. [citation needed] in which he blamed women themselves for being rape victims.[18][19] He said: "A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world... Strapless, backless, sleeveless, showing their legs, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans: all this to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature.[20][21]

In a case that became famous in 2011, an 11-year-old rape victim who suffered repeated gang rapes in Cleveland, Texas, was accused by the defense attorney of being a seductress who lured men to their doom.[22] "Like the spider and the fly. Wasn't she saying, 'Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?' ", he asked a witness.[22] 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.[22][23]

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 her outfit and being out late at night.[24]

See also

3

Notes

  1. ^ Fox, K. A.; Cook, C. L. (2011). "Is Knowledge Power? The Effects of a Victimology Course on Victim Blaming". Journal of Interpersonal Violence. doi:10.1177/0886260511403752.
  2. ^ Bieneck, S.; Krahe, B. (2010). "Blaming the Victim and Exonerating the Perpetrator in Cases of Rape and Robbery: Is There a Double Standard?". Journal of Interpersonal Violence. 26 (9): 1785–97. doi:10.1177/0886260510372945. PMID 20587449.
  3. ^ ISBN 9780394417264
  4. ^ Cole (2007) pp.111, 149, 213
  5. ^ Downs (1998) p. 24
  6. ^ a b Kirkpatrick (1987) p. 219
  7. ^ Kent (2003)
  8. ^ Illinois state U. archives.
  9. ^ Ryan, William (1976). Blaming the Victim. Vintage. ISBN 0-394-72226-4.[page needed]
  10. ^ a b Robinson (2002) p.141
  11. ^ Adorno, TW (1947) Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler in Kenyon Review Vol.ix (1), p. 158
  12. ^ James Martin Harding (1997) Adorno and "A writing of the ruins": essays on modern aesthetics and Anglo-American literature and culture, p.143 quotation: "The mechanisms of this ideological affinity between Baraka and Wagner can be seen in a short critique of Wagner that Adorno wrote directly after the Second World War—at a time when Adorno was perhaps his most direct in singling out the proto-fascist tendencies in Wagner's corpus and character. Adorno criticizes Wagner's having bated his conductor Herman Levi so that he would seem to bear the responsibility for Wagner's subsequent insulting dismissal of him. This, for Adorno, is a classic example of blaming the victim. The anti-Semitic sub-text to the dismissal, viz., that as a Jew Levi supposedly desired and brought the dismissal upon himself, "bears witness to the existence of one of the most sinister features of the Fascist character even in Wagner's time: the paranoid tendency of projecting upon others one's own violent aggressiveness and then indicting, on the basis of this projection, those whom one endows with pernicious qualities" (Adorno "Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler" 158)."
  13. ^ Adorno and the political By Espen Hammer p.63
  14. ^ Nicky Ali Jackson (22 February 2007). Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence. Taylor & Francis. pp. 715–. ISBN 978-0-203-94221-5. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
  15. ^ Baumeister, Roy (1999). Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. Holt. ISBN 0-8050-7165-2.[page needed]
  16. ^ "Factsheets: Trauma of Victimization – Secondary Injuries". Svfreenyc.org. 21 August 2012. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
  17. ^ Attention: This template ({{cite pmid}}) is deprecated. To cite the publication identified by PMID 10606433, please use {{cite journal}} with |pmid=10606433 instead.
  18. ^ "Aussie cleric Feiz Mohammad calls for beheading of Dutch MP Geert Wilders". The Australian. 3 September 2010. Retrieved 22 April 2013.
  19. ^ "Oz Muslim leaders criticise Islamic cleric's 'call for beheading' Dutch politician". Sify.com. 6 September 2010. Retrieved 22 April 2013.
  20. ^ "Muslim cleric: women incite men's lust with 'satanic dress'", by Miranda Devine, The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 2005.
  21. ^ Miranda Devine. "How a vile sermon of ignorance has done Australia a big favour". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 23 April 2013.
  22. ^ a b c Adams, Sam (29 November 2012). "Cleveland, Texas rape case: Defense attorney calls pre-teen victim a spider, but that's his job". Slate. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  23. ^ "NY Times Defends Victim Blaming Coverage of Child Rape Case". Mediabistro.com. 10 March 2011. Retrieved 28 April 2013.
  24. ^ "Amid rape fiasco, India's leaders keep up insensitive remarks". Washington Post. 4 January 2013. Retrieved 28 April 2013.

References

Further reading

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