"blaming the victim"

In My Humble Opinion
1

My friends and I ride motorcycles. On those rare occasions when one of us crashes or has a close call, we pick the incident apart to see what the rider could have done differently to have maybe prevented it from happening at all. This often involves pointing at behaviors that are perfectly within our rights (e.g. lingering in the blind spot of another driver, or hugging the double-yellow line around a tight blind curve), but are understood to substantially increase our risk for a crash. In this way we all learn from the incident, and the hope is that this makes us better riders; by incorporating those lessons into our own riding habits, we are less likely to be involved in a crash in the future.

We never think of this as “blaming the victim.” We just understand that:

  1. we have a lot to lose;
  2. we don’t want to lose it;
  3. prosecution of (or financial compensation from) the at-fault party may not make us whole again after a crash; and
  4. it’s often within our power to take action to prevent a crash, even if the crash may not have been our fault.

However, the application of this potentially useful thought process to other situations involving assault/injury are often regarded as blaming the victim. Rape is particularly troublesome in this regard. Yes, there are some folks who will explicitly blame the victim, or hold the perpetrators to be less culpable, because of the victim’s behavior prior to/during the attack. But that’s not what I’m talking about. It seems to me that we can hold the perpetrators to be entirely morally/criminally responsible for their actions in such cases, but often there are valuable lessons to be learned by examining the actions of the victim. For example, a woman getting drunk and passing out at a frat party is not “asking for it,” nor does she deserve to be raped - and if she is raped, the perps should be hung from a wall by their toes. But although a woman is entirely within her rights to drink herself into oblivion at a frat party, it’s behavior that puts her at risk, much like leaving your keys in the ignition in a bad neighborhood or telling the whole internet exactly when you’ll be on vacation. It seems reasonable to say “you know, if you do X, you increase your risk for Y. Whatever personal fulfillment you may be getting out of doing X, are you really sure it’s worth that risk?”

Thoughts?

2

It seems to me that there is a big difference between either voluntarily going over your own actions to judge what you could have done differently or giving generalized advise and giving unasked for advice on what someone could have done differently.

In my opinion, “Damn, I should not have gone into the alley alone as it made it easier for someone to mug me” or “As a group let’s discuss how going into dark alleys alone can increase your chances of being mugged” are very different in tone than “If you didn’t want to be mugged then you should not have gone into the alley alone.”

I think accusations of victim blaming are coming much more from examples of the last instance than the first two.

3

I think the comparison would only be apt if you were deliberately run down by other drivers. If someone points their car at you and floors it with the purpose of causing a motorcyclist harm, there’s absolutely no point in dissecting the rider’s behavior to see what they could have done differently. That’s the valid analogy; you’re talking about accidents, which (to me) are completely different.

4

Managing risk is an appropriate behavior. People that take steps to evaluate situations where they could potentially be at greater risk based upon past examples that have occurred to themselves or others, are prudent. To not do so, could be considered naïve, ignorant, or foolish.

5

Sure there is. If it happened to me, I’d surely be reviewing my own behavior to see what I could have done differently. Maybe I shouldn’t have given him the finger after he cut me off the first time; maybe I should have just put some distance between me and him as soon as it became clear that he was a rage-prone lunatic. OTOH, maybe the guy was just in a drug-fueled rage, looking for trouble, and I was the first person he came across and I had no time to react. But I’ll never know unless I bother to example my own behavior.

It may be that in some cases there’s nothing I could have (or would have) done differently, but to write off entire classes of incidents without examining them seems guaranteed to discard potentially useful learning opportunities.

6

Yeah, when a motorcycle rider does something risky and ends up in a collision, the equivalent would be a woman getting drunk at a party, tripping and falling on a guy, and having his hand accidentally grab her boob. Nobody planned on that or chose that, but it happened. Stuff like a mugging is chosen and acted upon. It would be like a car driver seeing you in the next lane and deciding to run you off the road. That’s not your fault, even if you say, flipped the car driver off. They chose to do that to you.

There’s also the part where women hear the same advice about 8,956,402,495,167 times in their lives, starting before they’re teenagers. Offering unwanted “advice” in this vein (please note, different from asked-for advice) as though women haven’t heard it already or don’t take it into account is disingenuous at best.

7

Do you really need a catastrophic incident like this, or the threat of one, to know that you shouldn’t engage in anti-social behavior like flipping people off? Are you suggesting that that’s a meaningful and novel insight?

8

Motor vehicle crashes != rape, robbery, or assault.

Motor vehicle crashes can be literally no-fault: unseen road conditions, unforeseeable mechanical failure, etc. No matter how assiduously you manage risk, they can happen, and do not require the malice nor even the negligence of any party.

Violent crimes, on the other hand, never happen by accident. No matter how risky or ill-advised the victim’s behavior may have been, it required the malice and lawless actions of another. Rapists aren’t mudslides or earthquakes.

9

All true. But you seem to be saying that deliberate malice on the part of the transgressor precludes the possibility of the victim having done anything to expose themselves to risk - or more importantly, that there may be things the victim can do (or not do) in the future to reduce their risk. If I walk through a high-crime neighborhood at night wearing flashy clothes and expensive jewelry and I get robbed, shouldn’t I expect to be told “you might want to think twice about your actions in the future,” even as I watch my attackers get convicted/sentenced?

does advice on how to avoid being a crime victim amount to “blaming the victim” if it’s given after a crime has already happened?

Not me personally, but yes, there are some people out there who opt to escalate road rage incidents until they (predictably) turn out really badly. For some people, the idea of de-escalation is a foreign concept.

10

Let’s talk about the weather.

You can’t have a discussion with the weather and cause it to accommodate your needs; it would be foolish to try, and therefore a practical approach to the weather is to predict it as best you can, dress for it, stay away from it when it is bad, seek shelter from it if you get caught in a sudden change, and just cope with it as best you can when those measures aren’t sufficient. And we have disapproval or even contempt for people who don’t do any of those things and then bewail their fate: “Next time take an umbrella and get some damn boots, seriously!”

Now let’s talk about social oppression. Pick one. Got one in mind? OK, now there is a society, consisting of both formal organizations that have laws and rules and policies and of informal interactions of people with their attitudes and behaviors and judgments and priorities and stuff. And before “we” (whoever “we” is in this situation) recognized that there was something non-inevitable about this oppressive situation, before we recognized that it didn’t have to be like this and that it’s unfair for it to be like this, we treated the status quo like it was the weather. Oh, you were stupid enough to be dressed in a way that identifies you as That Outgroup, and you went into places known to be less than the safest refuge, and got your teeth knocked out? What did you expect, idiot? Oh, you stood up in that room and spoke as if you were a full-fledged person entitled to have an opinion and possessing the right to participate, and got jailed and raped and your kids taken away? Well, duh, I could have told you that was likely to happen!

Social oppression is not like the weather. The participants can change their behavior. Changes are usually effected by the oppressed changing their behavior first. They stop accommodating. They stand up and speak out and take risks.

Telling them at that point that they are being foolish — “what, you went into a bar wearing a short red skirt, and thought you could just order some drinks and not get sexually harassed, what’s wrong with you, girl?” & etc — is indeed “victim blaming”. At best, to speak thusly is to leave out part of what needs to be said.

11

And at least the last one is logical; too often the logic is more along the lines of “if you hadn’t had money you wouldn’t have gotten mugged” (I haven’t heard that one, but I have heard grabs justified by having grabbable parts).

12

To tell them they are being foolish is to be judgmental. It’s up to the victim (or potential future victim) to judge whether their own actions are foolish or not (where “foolish” means contrary to their personal objectives and/or their level of risk tolerance). People are free to take risks as they see fit, but I think it’s willful blindness to refuse to acknowledge that there are things a person can do to mitigate their risk of harm (if that’s what they want to do) - whether that harm is due to malice or mother nature.

If your home got burgled because you left your door unlocked while you were on vacation and posted on Facebook when you would be gone, would you be indignant when your friends inevitably told you that that next time you should lock your door and keep your vacation plans confidental? Would you call that blaming the victim and continue to leave your door unlocked, or would you think to yourself, “next time I’m locking the door and keeping my vacation plans confidential?”

George Zimmerman took a risk by getting out of his truck to follow Trayvon Martin. A lot of people were mad at him for putting himself in a situation in which he was vulnerable to physical assault by Martin. Does that constitute victim-blaming? Should he be culpable for shooting in self-defense because he effectively put himself in a situation where it was necessary to do so?

A valid point.

13

Accident investigations are subject to root cause analysis. This doesn’t stop at victim-blaming, since often the victim had not been trained to perform the function or made aware of its hazards by the appropriate oversight body.

14

Two years ago, Emily Yoffe wrote this article. The tone of the article is entirely professional; nothing in it can rationally be described as saying that anyone ever deserves to be raped. Nonetheless, claims that Yoffe was “blaming the victim” propagated everywhere.

I think that both Machine Elf’s OP and Yoffe’s article are well-written and intelligent. If we could flip a switch and prevent all rapes, we would, but we can’t. Thus we should, in addition to having laws and police and courts to stop and prevent as many rapes as possible, also give advice and training to possible victims on how to reduce your chance of being raped. And obviously the same applies to other crimes.

15

Certainly there is a point where examination of one’s behavior for risk, and sometimes it does become victim blaming, but frankly, I think it’s often a WAY under practiced thought process. Yes, sometimes things happen that are completely out of our control, even from a risk analysis perspective. Beyond that, analyzing what choices we’ve made and how it affected our risk for certain undesirable outcomes doesn’t necessarily mean that the victim is blamed or the perpetrator is absolved, but we can learn from it. After all, we cannot change other people, but we can change ourselves. Yes, sometimes it’s unfair that we can’t do things within our rights and, in an ideal world, shouldn’t increase our risk, but sometimes it is a balancing act of exercising our rights and protecting ourselves.

Actually, I think motorcycles are a great example of why this is important. In theory, they have all the same rights and responsibilities as cars, but if one just assumes that to be true, then it could be dangerous. Sometimes, someone in the car is going to be aggressive and, unfortunately, like standing up to a much bigger bully, sometimes you’re better off just letting them go. Sure, maybe you had the right of way, but that’s going to be little consolation if you get seriously injured or killed.

Other times, those drivers aren’t being aggressive, maybe they’re just distracted, which is still their fault. Or maybe just just plain don’t see you. Again, none of this is your fault, but it can easily mean the difference between life and death.

But taking a step farther back, the risk of riding a bike, in general, is just going to be higher than being in a larger vehicle. We ALL engage in behavior that has risk associated with it, it doesn’t necessarily make it our fault if things go wrong, but if one is going to make that choice to engage in that behavior, at some level, one is choosing to subject oneself to that risk. Maybe when things do go wrong, it’s because we miscalculated the risk or we got unlucky, but the answer isn’t just a black and white “do or don’t do” the behavior. Sometimes we can do something that has some risk associated with it but then take additional steps to mitigate it.

But, ultimately, it does seem to me that the largest factor is underestimating risk and then, as a result, not taking enough steps to mitigate it. I don’t bike myself, but the ones I do know have all said that it’s only a matter of time before you lay your bike out. If that scares you out of it, fine, but you can still wear a helmet and other protective gear and be more vigilant when riding. Similarly, I don’t think anyone texts or drinks while driving if they REALLY understand just how risky that behavior is or they somehow feel immune to those risks.

But it does seem odd to me how this whole idea of risk management can be seen as degrading or offensive when it’s applied in certain aspects of life. Yes, a woman is well within her rights to go to a frat party and get smashed, but a reasonable person would understand that that does have risks associated with it. If someone does take advantage of her, he is fully to blame for his actions, but it’s still possible that perhaps if she took different steps it might have been avoided. I don’t think it’s victim blaming to take an unfortunate example like that and try to prevent others from ending up with a similar fate. Or, we can just call it victim blaming, learn nothing, and run the risk of making a similar mistake again in the future.

Really, ISTM that it’s pretty much the only way any of us learn, by making mistakes, assessing what went wrong, and taking a corrective action to limit or prevent the undesirable result again in the future.

16

That is my problem with the victim blaming thing even when it is obvious what is really going on is dissecting the circumstances that lead up to the incident to avoid it in the future. It isn’t really about blame but finding ways to mitigate risk.

To do otherwise is simply to deny reality.

17

It’s a problematic phrase because it starts fights, but I think most things that are called “victim-blaming” are actually an indirect form of partially blaming the victim. They’re about mitigating risk, but they’re more about calling people on the carpet for not meeting unreasonable risk mitigation standards that we’ve imposed on them.

The real issue with lots of victim-blaming statements is one of focus or significance. In a hyper-rational world where we never inferred attitudes or implications from statements, you could make lots of technically true observations about events that might increase or decrease the odds of other events occurring, and nobody would be offended or suggesting you were blaming the victim, because you could hyper-rationally respond that yes, in fact, you were blaming the victim in the sense that you assigned .094% of the responsibility to the victim based on behaviors X and Y, but no more responsibility than that. And that would be fine.

In the real world, we infer that there’s an “and therefore” attached to the things that people choose to point out. When we point out risks, there’s a necessary suggestion of “and therefore, you shouldn’t have done that.” Which is what blame is! We don’t point out every connection between behavior and risk; only some, and as a result, we assume that what other people do point out, they think is important and is reasonable to require from the victim. This is an objectionable thing to try to argue to people who don’t think they’re blaming assault victims, but it’s easy to demonstrate in the abstract – what’s the difference between pointing out “you were speeding and texting while riding and that’s why you crashed” and “hanging out over there where you could’ve been in a blind spot probably contributed to the accident” and “if you didn’t have a motorcycle you wouldn’t have gotten hurt”? All of them are equally technically true. The implied difference that makes one more offensive than the other is that it’s implicitly suggested by pointing something out that it matters, and whereas “don’t be an idiot” and “don’t hang out in blind spots” seem fair enough, we really don’t like the idea that “if you don’t want to be run over, just don’t ride your bike;” that seems like much more of an imposition. Some risks are transparently ones that the person failed by not mitigating. When we decide to point risks out, what we’re suggesting is that this was one of those risks.

So in the more highly charged instance of a rape that’s already occurred, when a person says “well, if you go out to bars and drink, the risk goes up, ladies!”, it’s not unreasonable to infer from that that what we’re saying is, essentially, that women aren’t allowed to go to bars – “and therefore, you shouldn’t.” We’re suggesting that they’re required to conform to a standard of behavior that isn’t reasonable. And it’s especially obvious that we’re doing it because we’re pointing it out after the fact, by saying that the standard of behavior we require has been violated.

18

Okay, really: How many of us really think that women have not already heard all the advice on “how to not get raped”? Do we honestly, really, absolutely think, that a significant number of women have never heard, “Walking alone at night is dangerous” or “Men take advantage of drunk women” or “Stay with your friends to be more safe” (etc, etc, etc, ETC). That this is brand new information for them?

The silly slippery slope argument is: she did everything “right” and then it happened anyway. OK, so how much is still her responsibility? Is it now her responsibility to stay inside because obviously her being outside in the presence of men made her a target? That’s a silly argument. But women get the same feeling when told, “Don’t drink socially, because obviously men will try to take advantage of you!” Yeah, and some of us have lives to lead, and we want to act like normal human beings and we want everyone else to act like normal human beings too. So we’re going to go out and have some drinks regardless, because damn it, it shouldn’t be this way.

And that brings us to this point:

If we all just lay down and don’t challenge the status quo by taking risks, it’s not going to change. Nobody else is going to change the world for you. And believe me, things can be changed. History supports it.

With motorcycles…well, you can’t change physics.

19

People choose to be motercyle riders; they don’t choose to be women. If you decide you’d like to drive with a lax additide in a safe environment, you can switch vehicles. I cannot decide to don a stronger, taller body because I’d like to get drunk at a party.

20

Right, people get upset about victim-blaming, because there is practically nothing a woman can do without getting some blame. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a victim coming out without people questioning parts or all of her story immediately, and blaming her.

For example, there was a few years ago when abortion access was being debated in the South Dakota congress, and one of the state Senators said what the only possible exception should be:

For this theoretical girl, abortion should be maybe allowed, but not for anyone else, because it would be so traumatic. But I guess it wouldn’t be equally traumatic for a woman who already had sex to be “brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated.”