"blaming the victim"

In My Humble Opinion
101

Hmm. You know, I wanted to attack your post for ignorance but you’re on to something. Suppose there’s a “bad area of town”. That area is crammed full of criminals. Saying “I should be able to walk in that area and not get attacked” is just being idealist and is not realistic - the authorities are not arresting the criminals as fast as new criminals are entering the area/being created/being released from jail. If they were, then the area wouldn’t be a cesspool of crime as a long term equilibrium.

You have choice A : go home to your suburban house. And choice B : go walk in that area of town.

You choose choice B. From an individual risk perspective, I’d say that the risk differential - say 1% chance of getting mugged versus 90% - the 89% chance of getting mugged is solely on you! You are more to blame for getting mugged than the mugger is!

So I think the problem is we are conflating terms here. Yes, the mugger who mugged you choose to mug you, he could have continued doing whatever he was doing. Yet, the chance of you getting mugged went up to near certainty as a result of your actions.

I’m not a probability expert. That choice A/choice B reasoning is an excellent tool, though, and to ignore it and say “well since I *should *be able to walk the streets of this area of town, I’m just going to do so” makes you stupid. It would be like going to explore the inside of the Chernobyl reactor because that thing should have been cleaned up already.

So I don’t see anything wrong with simultaneously saying “young lady, don’t go to a frat party, get drunk, and go alone to a frat boy’s bedroom if you were not intending to have sex” and saying “young man, don’t be raping, no means no”. The lady should have been able to do that but since there is no realistic possibility of cleaning up every danger, she should have chosen actions that minimize her exposures to those dangers, or chosen to take calculated risks. And the man shouldn’t have committed the crime.

102

Regarding the “more to blame” thing, what I’m saying is there’s a probability difference.

Victim walks alone in the bad area of town, voluntarily, when he/she could have instead done something else that has a 1% chance of getting attacked instead of 90%. So the victim raised his/her probability of getting attacked by 89%.

A street criminal sees the victim. He can keep smoking meth or attack the victim, hoping for some cash. Thing is, if he doesn’t attack, the next criminal probably will. So he’s only increasing the victim’s chance of getting attacked from like 89% to 100% if he attacks. 11% differential.

I understand that legally we can say the street criminal is solely to blame because in no way did the victim ‘ask for it’ explicitly. (There are cases where the victim could have been “asking for it”, such as if he accosted the other party and appeared to be reaching for a weapon.). But in terms of probability difference, the victim is more responsible than the criminal is.

Visiting a den of possible rapists like a frat house…well. You do your own math.

103

I’m no statistician, but I’m pretty sure math doesn’t work that way.

104

Give numbers or equations, not generic statements that sound good. If you believe you are qualified enough to be “pretty sure” Decision theory is wrong, or you are “pretty sure” I’m applying it wrong, provide cites, rough explanations, or a description of your alternate theory please.

105

Anyone have any stats or facts to back that up? Is it still common practice, in the USA of 2015?

I think a good mental model for thinking about this is to have advice given by a third party… it makes it a bit less emotionally fraught.

So, there’s a woman, Alice. She’s visiting a strange town. She asks an acquaintance for some advice on what to do for fun, and he tells her “hey, you should go to this party that’s happening on Saturday. Dress really nice! Here’s the address!”, and gives her the address of a notoriously unsafe biker bar. (He’s doing this with full malice, knowing that it’s very bad advice. His motives are irrelevant.)

She goes to the bar, and is raped.

Also at the bar is Beth, a woman who knew the area, had been warned about going to this bar, and went to the bar anyhow, for general bar-attendance reasons. She is also raped.

Also at the bar is Connie, a UPS driver is was delivering a package to the bar. She felt like she couldn’t risk her job buy refusing an assignment she knew was dangerous, and was worried about it, and did every last careful thing she could think of, but she is also raped.
Now, it’s clear to me that the three rapists are guilty of basically the same crime, and should be punished equally. They are all rapists, and should pay the full penalty for rape.

But in the case of Alice, it’s also quite clear to me that the acquaintance who gave her the bad advice is, ethically, somewhat responsible for what happened to her. He took actions which, as a predictable result, partially led to her being raped. But that doesn’t in any way lessen the guilt of the actual rapist.
But if you accept that argument (and of course there’s no requirement that you do), then why is it impossible that, much as the acquaintance giving bad advice in Alice’s case be ethically somewhat responsible, without it lessening the guilt of the actual rapist; that Beth could be, ethically, somewhat responsible for what happened to Beth herself, without it lessening the guilt of the actual rapist.
Note, by the way, that I think it’s a terrible idea to actually use that sort of language to describe what happened to Beth, particularly to Beth herself. I’m bringing this up not to endorse that sort of language, but to dispute your claim that responsibility is zero-sum.

So victim-blaming is something so horrible and toxic that we can’t even have a meta-discussion about victim-blaming without that discussion actually being victim-blaming?

There’s a world of difference between someone who learns that a woman was raped, and then says “well, she shouldn’t have been doing X, she was asking for it”; and a meta-discussion of imaginary Alice, Beth and Connie. To say that those are both “victim-blaming” and thus both automatically off-limits weakens the term into ridiculousness.

106

At issue here is not the question whether the risk of being subjected to rape can be drastically reduced by, for instance, immediately committing suicide, or encasing oneself in a concrete block.

At issue is the moral appropriateness of “blame” for failure to do so.

Max - Montana Judge Who Partly Blamed Teen Rape Victim Censured

107

At issue here is also the acceptable level of risk before it’s not really productive to cure the symptom instead of the disease.

Look, if you throw yourself off a bridge, and you die, it’s probably a little bit your own fault. I think we all understand that.

But say that the rape figures rise to a level where a woman can’t leave her house without being assaulted. Is it reasonable to ask her to stay inside, forever? And if she does go outside, because she needs to go to shop for toilet paper, should we blame her for the inevitable assault? Sure, you could say that she accepted the risk, so sucks to be her. But how is that statement useful to anyone? Instead, we should probably be doing something about the fact that this neighborhood has become a freaking hellhole all of a sudden.

There’s a line that needs drawing here, is all. Is it reasonable to ask women to never go outside in the dark? To not go to parties alone? To always inform someone about their plans when they go on a date?

If the answer is “yes”, then, IMHO, the current risk of sexual assault is higher than we should be comfortable with in a modern society, and we should look into curing the disease.

If the actual risk isn’t high enough to warrant such advice, then, when something does happen, it’s not reasonable to blame the victim, as she wasn’t doing anything unreasonable.

Is it reasonable to advise her not to get blind drunk and pass out at a frat party? Heck, yeah, probably. But there is line to be drawn there somewhere.

108

There I was speaking only from personal experience: to the best of my recollection, the victim-blaming dynamic has arisen in some shape or form in every prominent American rape case I can recall reading about, in my adult life. Of course I may have forgotten about less dramatic cases, but I’m confident that the dynamic is alive and well.

Not exactly right. The deliberate-bad-advice-giver is guilty of a different transgression. He has zero responsibility for the rape, as such, because he is not the rapist.

The analogy with a rape-victim’s own accidentally ‘risky’ decisions is too strained to touch.

We need to talk, more than ever, about how toxic victim-blaming is. You’re still talking about how it is sometimes sort of appropriate to blame victims. Why are you so committed to the proposition? How does it hurt you, to refrain from criticizing (some) raped women?

No. Not a world, at all. When we tell stories, it is entirely natural for people to look for points of identification with the characters and situations. This is part of the point and the power of storytelling as rhetorical device, whether the characters are presented as imaginary or not.

109

In essence, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. It doesn’t matter what the truth is. It doesn’t matter how we handle other crimes, or what we do to protect ourselves against other forms of crime. Rape is special, and we have to treat it differently than everything else because to say otherwise, you must be pro-rape.

This is the same destructive politically correct thinking that has led to a lot of other catastrophically bad policies. Essentially, any amount of reasoning you try to apply gets dismissed because it turns into a personal attack against the person saying them.

If you say the EPA needs to prove pollution of a particular type is harmful? You must be pro-pollution.

If you say affirmative action is racism? You’re the racist.

If you say some people might have genes more useful for the current environment than others? You’re a Nazi.

If you talk about people of “normal” gender and sexual orientation? You’re a biggot.

110

You’re claiming the poser “trans” kid with the schlong on display in the other thread as a victory, aren’t you?

111

Once again, not a math expert, just a decent thinking human being. Seems like Decision theory concerns itself with risk. Risk and blame are not the same thing. One of them is seeped in culture, history, and emotions. Quantifying blame with statistics strikes me as gauche at best.

Anyone arguing yet that the frat boys shouldn’t drink more than a couple of slowly sipped drinks at their parties?

112

Yes, I have already argued that binge drinking has many harms to all.

113

On Sunday I went for a motorcycle ride in the countryside outside of Ann Arbor. As usual, I chose to finish my ride with a slow cruise through downtown Ann Arbor; it affords a nice bit of people-watching and interesting starts/stops/turns. Before I left for my ride, my rather risk-averse wife advised that I stay away from downtown, reminding me that all of the University of Michigan students were returning for the fall semester; she was concerned that traffic would be dense, and there would be an overabundance of people who were unfamiliar with the area and therefore likely to do stupid stuff, increasing my risk of a crash. I was rather annoyed, as avoiding downtown altogether seemed like overkill; to me, it would have been an unreasonable curtailing of a fulfilling part of my ride.

As it happened, during my downtown cruise I came close to nailing a dumbass pedestrian who decided to cross mid-block right in front of me without looking. I read his body language and saw it coming, and was able to stop with a few feet to spare. But afterward it occurred to me that if I had hit this idiot, my wife surely would have blamed me for taking the risk of riding through downtown in the first place.

I’ve participated in a few threads on this board where new motorcyclists were asking for advice. Along with a lot of good info, totally useless advice along the lines of “sell your bike while you still have all of your limbs” is inevitable. Such advice is useless because riders are going to ride: not riding simply isn’t an option.

And so, when I see stuff in the current discussion like this:

I think I get it. A lot of the rape avoidance advice that is proffered would have women insulate themselves from the rest of the world in impractical ways that would make their lives boring, unfulfilling logistical nightmares. Like motorcyclists, women must pick and choose their risks as they see fit - and many of the risks women are advised to avoid are so small (compared to the cost of avoidance) that the advice amounts to an unrealistic/phobic level of risk aversion. In the unlikely event that something bad does happen, it’s not helpful to have someone afterward saying “I told you you shouldn’t have done that;” it’s not helpful, and doesn’t serve any purpose other than making the speaker feel smug.

At the same time, some advice, like not drinking yourself unconscious at a party, seems pretty reasonable. Drunk young men may still 100% responsible for their behavior according to the law (and according to any sane person’s moral code), but they reliably do stupid stuff to the people and things around them – especially if it’s the kind of party where people are drinking so heavily that some folks are passing out. If you’re a man and you pass out drunk at a college party, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll end up with your face getting written on. Or worse: when my brother and his friends were in college back in the 80s, a guy passed out at their party and they went ahead and shaved off his pubic hair. It’s unfortunate that unconscious women typically have more to lose in this sort of situation than unconscious men.

Which brings me to another question, asked out of honest curiosity: if I pass out at a rowdy party that’s populated predominantly with young gay men, am I as likely to be sexually assaulted as an unconscious woman would be at a party populated with young straight men? Any data on this?

As for this:

My analogies did not objectify your body or equate it with property. They equate rapists with thieves and bad drivers only in the abstract sense of risk analysis and the possibility of a victim suffering an adverse outcome.

They did not endorse, implicitly or otherwise, the notion that another person is entitled to take liberties with your defenseless body any more than merely opening your wallet entitles someone to swipe your cash. At no time in this thread have I ever suggested that a rapist, thief, or negligent driver should be held less than 100% responsible, legally, and morally, for his crime. That you would claim otherwise is offenderati nonsense.

114

You did. You literally did, because you chose property damage as your analogies.

If you want to avoid that, chose analogies involving assault and battery instead of property.

115

And…here’s why it matters: when you change the instance to crimes of assault and battery, and the victim’s gender, there’s a lot less victim blaming.

I live in Chicago. When a person is shot, or when a man is assaulted, I almost never hear, “What was he doing in that neighborhood?!” What I hear is, “this city is going to hell,” or “this used to be such a good neighborhood,” or “there’s no safe neighborhoods anymore.”

The environment itself gets the blame, even if it’s recognized as a “bad” environment.

Not so with rape.

116

I think there needs to be some clarity here as to where the real risk lies. Per Manda Jo’s assertion re night walking, clothing choices, doing private meetings etc. being much lower risk activities than people pump them up to be with respect to being real world sexual assault risks, she is entirely correct. The vast majority of dangerous behavior that puts a woman at maximum risk of sexual assault revolves around drinking to excess and/or over indulging in other recreational drugs. Clothing, walking locations and times, meeting venues etc. are miniscule risk factors compared to getting seriously drunk or very high.

The response to the position that it’s unfair to be more emphatic to women in urging drinking moderation, and you can’t take that position unless you warn men not to drink and rape with equal emphasis has the following problem. It’s really not stumbling, sloppy drunk men raping women. It’s drinking, but non-drunk predators. These men* are *moderating their drinking while waiting and watching, and often encouraging women to drink (or drug themselves) more, looking for their opening. A lot of the time the predators in these scenarios are known to the women they rape as friends, co-workers, associates etc. Telling men not to drink and rape is kind of pointless as blitzed men are not the real risk factors here.

If a woman is going to get drunk and throw herself on the mercy of men’s impulses she will be OK most of the time, as most men even with a drunk and pliable woman, will behave sensibly, but eventually there is a high risk there will come a time and place where that goes out the window and bad shit will happen.

Drinking to excess is the overwhelming real world risk factor in being raped. All the talk about clothing, time of day, bad streets, walking postures etc. is just low level noise compared to it. You can say with perfect logic that hard partying while drunk does not entitle anyone to rape you, but if you continue to do it and eventually you get raped, the assertion that the decision to drink too much is utterly disconnected from all responsibility of that happening is a difficult fiction to maintain.

117

Here’s an excerpt from a blog about life in DC; is the exchange victim blaming?

It seems like some good, common sense advice.

118

Well, the victim responded “it was definitely our fault.” Sounds like blame to me.

I mean, if what you’re saying is it’s blame, but they deserve it, that’s one thing. But up until now what I’ve been reading is that this kind of “advice” is not assigning any blame or fault to the victim.

119

That may well be true, I don’t honestly know. Certainly, if it is true, it is a bad thing that I hope changes.

Someone linked to a case of a judge being censured for making victim-blaming-esque statements about a 14-year-old rape victim. That could be viewed as evidence for either side… it could be the case that that type of action on the judge’s part is now sufficiently rare that it draws notice and censure (which would be a good thing, we’re making progress), or it could be the case that his actions were merely an extreme outlier in what is still a common behavior pattern.

Are you talking legal responsibility or moral/ethical responsibility? Because if you’re talking moral/ethical responsibility, we might just plain disagree. He knowingly took an action which increased the likelihood of something bad happening to her, without telling her, intending that that bad thing happen to her. And then it did happen to her. The fact that there’s another actor involved (the actual rapist) doesn’t decrease his responsibility for his part in what happened any more than his part in what happened decreases the rapist’s responsibility.

If two people pull out guns and simultaneously riddle a third person with bullets until dead, the two people are both 100% guilty of the crime of murder. They aren’t only guilty of “half-murder” each. And if someone hires a hit man to kill someone, the hit man is 100% guilty of murder and the hirer is also 100% guilty of some crime (not sure exactly which one, but likely murder). More than one person can be simultaneously responsible for something happening, with neither one’s responsibility lessening the other’s. That’s why I keep saying it’s not zero sum. (Note the difference between that and, say, a civil case where a court decides that two different corporations are 70% and 30% to blame for some bad outcome or other… that’s a specific case in which precise totaling-up-of-responsibilities IS necessary because a fine is going to be assessed.)

Am I? I think the following statements are true:
(1) Giving advice on ways that women can mitigate the risks of rape (for instance, covering their drinks at parties) can be useful, and can reduce (but not eliminate) their risk of being raped. Reducing someone’s risk of being raped is a good thing. Some such advice is better than others, some contexts are more appropriate for giving such advice than others. (And this is of course not the only thing that should be done as part of an overall plan to reduce rapes.)
(2) A woman who has been raped might or might not have advice on how other women can avoid what happened to her. But for third parties to tell her after the fact what she could have done differently, or question her choices, is hideously insensitive and rude.
(3) Responsibility is not zero sum, but I would not in real life describe a rape victim as being responsible for what happened, and would certainly not use even more loaded and hateful language such as “was asking for it” or “deserved it”.
(4) Having meta-discussions about this issue on a message board needs to be acceptable.

If one of those to you means that I think it is “sometimes appropriate to blame victims”, well, then I’m not sure what that actually precisely means. But it then feels like you’re trying to use it as some talisman… “well, your position is X, but that is blaming victims, therefore it is wrong and you are mean”.

I don’t know if I have ever criticized any raped woman.

It’s not particularly important to me on the grand scheme of things, but I do think it’s an interesting and complicated topic. I’m also very committed to the idea of blame not being zero sum because it comes up in all sorts of other debates… “hey, you do have the right to burn the Koran if you want to, but if you do, and someone gets killed, some of that responsibility is on you”, etc.

That’s a fair point… but if you take that to its logical conclusion then we can’t ever discuss the topic at all, which is both impractical and unacceptable.

120

When I say “it doesn’t matter if it’s your house or your wallet or your body or your motorcycle,” I am not equating all of those things. And FWIW, when I brought up motorcycle crashes I wasn’t at all concerned about the motorcycle; I was concerned about serious physical injury. The bike can always be fixed, but the mind and body sometimes cannot.

My intent was to illustrate a situation in which one person’s behavior leaves them vulnerable to injury by another person. For the purpose of risk analysis, the nature of the injury (physical, financial, or emotional) and the motive of the person committing the injury (malevolent or negligent) - is irrelevant; your insistence on only studying situations involving malevolently-inflicted physical injuries is overly restrictive.

Victims (even male ones) do get blamed, even for non-violent crimes. I won’t argue about whether the line is drawn in different places for different people - it is. People who live in crime-ridden neigbborhoods sometimes get blamed just for living there (“FFS, why don’t they just move out of that shitty place?”). Even if they don’t get blamed for living there, I would probably get blamed by friends and family if I got mugged after choosing to leave my comfortable suburban home and venture such a crime-ridden neighborhood, even if I had (what I felt was) a good reason for doing so. The law even blames victims of car theft - if they were dumb enough to leave it running unattended. And as I described upthread, I’m certain my wife would have blamed me for riding downtown if I had struck a moronic pedestrian who had neither right-of-way nor sense of self-preservation.

Having said that, yes, I agree that there’s a lot of people who blame rape victims for taking the infinitesimal risks associated with living an ordinary, non-cloistered life.