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:
- we have a lot to lose;
- we don’t want to lose it;
- prosecution of (or financial compensation from) the at-fault party may not make us whole again after a crash; and
- 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?