Yes, it does. Anne Neville put it most succinctly.
I know that on previous assault attempts I never felt dirty; Gramps made me feel dirty. And part of it was this feeling of “incest happens to other people!” (poor people who live in cardboard houses, right? RIGHT? or in 25th-world countries? or in the middle of the rainforest, but not in Barcelona and with my mother saying “if your father hears a word of this, you’re out on the street”)
Skald, that almost made me throw up. I don’t know if I’ve got the :mad: or the :smack: right now, but I’ve sure got the heaves.
It’s lekatt who said that, and he is seriously batshit crazy. Every single thing that guy posts is sheer bugfuck. There’s no point in letting it get to you, because it stands precisely zero chance of being shared by anyone with even marginal reasoning skills.
Um… I don’t think the unnamed source was lekatt, although the unnamed source is indisputably a fucking loon. (Hey, it’s a big board, we have room for a couplefew fucking loons.)
That’s pretty much how I felt, too. I mean rationally I knew that didn’t make any sense but since one of my closest friends’ first reaction was to try and investigate my actions…I dunno, I guess I just figured it must say something about me.
I feel kind of guilty for saying that I’m sort of relieved that I’m not the only one who’s encountered this kind of thing…it’s awful that people still even today have this kind of reaction. But I guess I just figured, oh we’re over this as a society…the fact that someone’s blaming me must mean I really deserved it, or whatever.
And that “spiritual tie to the rapist” thing made me pretty nauseous, too, FTR.
It’s probably pretty deeply hardwired for humans, as well as other animals, to try to figure out what they did to cause an unpleasant experience. The survival value of that would be quite obvious (it would mean you could learn not to do harmful things like touch hot stoves). That instinct would probably kick in even when you really couldn’t have done anything to prevent the unpleasant experience.
Or maybe it’s blaming yourself to feel like you’re in control of whether this happens again. “It happened because I did X. If I don’t do X again, it won’t happen again”.
Now I’ve never been raped and I don’t know of explicit incidents with people I know. But I’d like to point out that the term “Blaming the Victim” is thrown out a lot in cases like rape and, IMHO, often incorrectly.
For example, saying that a woman is no longer honorable because she’s been raped isn’t blaming the victim. It’s a disgusting, vile mode of thought but it’s not the same as saying that the person brought the dishonor on themselves. The general thought there, I believe, is that the woman’s status has changed from “virgin” to “not virgin” where the latter is not OK. There’s no accusation of fault there.
Secondly, asking “What were you wearing?” or concluding “Your tight skirt caused them to rape you” isn’t blaming the victim either. Nor does “Were you out alone late at night?” For one thing, it doesn’t state that the rapist’s actions were OK. Second, it doesn’t say that the woman could have (or more importantly, should have) done something differently.
Third, claims of “It wasn’t that serious” isn’t blaming the victim either. It’s a rationalization of a different sort, I think. That’s of course assuming that the facts are well-known and obvious - I realize that’s not a given in all cases. But to downplay a rape incident is not the same thing as saying “the tramp brought it on herself”
“Blaming the Victim” should be reserved for when someone explicitly says “this girl [or guy] brought it on herself. She was practically begging for it.” in an attempt to take the blame off of the assailant. To use that term for all of the above rationalizations, jerkish attitudes, and head-in-the-sand statements is to make it seem more prominent than it really is. So I think it’s worthwhile to use a narrower brush on this sort of thing.
My mother informed me happily that she’d gotten counseling about her guilt over how I was molested by her boyfriend, and that made her realize that it wasn’t her fault.
I’d told her once, when I was 7, and she made me apologize to him for telling lies. It took me years to pluck up the courage to tell her again, and in the meantime the molestation did NOT stop.
There are definitely times when I want to tell her, “Yes, what happened to me WAS your fault, and I hope you can’t SLEEP because you DREAM about it, I hope it tortures you every goddamned day of your life, because you’re going to die before me and the pain will end for YOU, but MINE is going to go on and on…”
Things like my mother’s response is why I don’t tell many people about what happened to me.
I think this is a huge factor. It’s not so much about blaming the victim as it is about trying to convince yourself that it won’t happen to you.
The stories about families denying that abuse has happened in their own family are of course really disturbing. I think in those cases, it’s that some people just find it easier to pretend everything is okay in the family than to admit there is a serious problem and that the abuser really is not who they thought they were. I find that really sickening though and I am sorry to hear that it seems so common.
How nice it would be if horrible acts like rape were committed only by people with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, so no one would have to admit that a person they love did a horrible thing. Imagine how you’d feel if you knew your parent, significant other, or child, who you love dearly, had raped somebody. Much easier to think that the person who says your loved one did this is lying, and your loved one is a completely good person.
This whole blame-the-victim mentality regarding sexual assault is a big way to try to control women (and yes, women buy into it as well as men). I.e., women shouldn’t wear “provocative” clothes (which is really in the eye of the beholder, if I were in some other countries I’d be considered a slut for not covering my head); shouldn’t go out by themselves, etc. :mad:
This can be blaming the victim as well–it seems like whenever there is some horrendous case of sexual abuse of a minor by a man in the household, people fall all over themselves to blame the mother: she “must have known” or “was in denial” or “didn’t want to know”–I am sure this happens sometimes, but I am also sure that many times it basically comes down to “this couldn’t happen in my household because I would know”–which is just another form of “that couldn’t happen to me because I wouldn’t have worn that there”. Comforting to think, but impossible to be sure of.
One thing that’s shocked me as an adult is how much it turns out my mom didn’t know–not about sexual abuse (thank god) but about my worries and anxieties and various major events in my life. I just assumed, with the self-centeredness of childhood, that my mom knew everything and anything she didn’t say anything about was part of some sort of plan or intent on her part. This turned out not to be true.
The mind set of denial that everybody is talking about is psychological theory often known as the Just World Phenomenon, in case anybody wants to know more (See this also). It doesn’t just happen for rape either.
My mother was raped, at knife point, when she was eight months pregnant with me. I just found out 40 years later that on some level she blamed me for it; at least, she claims she could never “bond” with me because of the rape. So it’s complicated all around.
A college friend of mine was molested by a much older cousin when she was in her early teens. She said the worst thing, even worse than being molested, was her once beloved grandmother’s insistence that it was her fault for “tempting” the older boy. I’ve never met the woman, but I hate her.
KILL KILL KILL!!! I can kind of understand since going through a rape or sexual assault trial can be all shades of fucked up. BUT, when the rape is something that actually IS rape, the perpertrator is someTHING that needs to be locked away in the deepest darkest cell. You know…I wonder too, if a lot of the people who are all " They couldn’t possibilty have done what they did" may be a bit…not exactly the greatest judges of charector with some people.
Now here’s a question. There was a case at my jr high/high school
where two girls were molested (ie something out of NAMBLA where they had a long term intimate realtionship with him)
by the jr high gym teacher. One of the victims at the time, had a brain tumor. Now that’s kind of understandable that she wouldn’t have had the best social judgement. The gym teacher basicly preyed on her. However, the second victim was basicly normal. A friend and I were talking about this case…and we have NO clue why our friend didn’t realize that having an intimate realtionship with someone old enough to be your father wasn’t a good idea. (and the perp was extremely creepy looking) The victim was in the Resource Room…but I mean back then I was even more out of it socially, but the dude gave ME the creeps!
Would us not understanding why our friend didn’t realize that a romantic realtionship between a 12-13 year old girl and a 45-ish year old guy was wrong, be a form of victim blaming?
We weren’t saying that she was a slut or a Lolita…Just extremely puzzled as to why she didn’t realize that it wasn’t a good idea to be in a sitution like that.
Now here’s a question I just thought of…There are a lot of cases where the rape or molestation was 100% the perpetrator’s fault. But are there cases where while it’s not victim blaming…both the victim and the perpertrator did stuff that basicly caused the rape? I’m NOT saying for example something like a rapist / child molester misinterpreting “just normal social protrecal” as " they led me on! They seduced me!
But I mean…I think there’s a HUGE difference between two people (who know each other) who are drunk and don’t have the best judgement and for example the piece of radioactive cat feces who raped a friend of mine in a dentist’s chair when she was seventeen.
Well, yeah, same as “statutory rape” that’s labeled so because one person is over 18 and the other one 17-and-11-months isn’t the same as some dude saying “you want the job? suck my dick.”
But here we’re not talking about those things that are rape/abuse or not depending on how you look at it / local legislation.
Oh, and Chessic Sense? Yes, saying “you got raped because you were wearing jeans / a miniskirt / a long flowing skirt / a pencil skirt / slacks” is saying that you wouldn’t have been raped if you’d been wearing something else. Only, once there’s been judges opinions for all the options listed above, what are women supposed to wear, burkas?
It’s a bit more complicated than that of course, and I don’t want to go into too many details on the Public Interwebs. I was lured into a deserted area about ten years ago and raped. At the time, my judgment was questionable. I first went with my attacker willingly even though he was a stranger to me. Over the course of several hours, I did what I felt I had to do to survive. I never saw a weapon, but I was threatened with one. My reasoning was “better the gun I can’t see than the one held to my head.”
I will say that nobody else has ever blamed me for the attack (indeed, several people I told offered street justice), but I did not take steps to prosecute because I felt that I would have to defend myself. And I felt stupid. And numb. He was the rapist, but I should have known better. I figured the jury would feel the same.
(Oh, other than the one boyfriend I first confessed it to, who then tried to use similar words to what the rapist had used. WTF?)
I’m okay now, and in school and I work hard and have a lovely boyfriend. I don’t talk about it much.
