Getting back to the OP: There are some times when the “victim” isn’t clean, or isn’t really innocent, and this especially comes into play when both sides were engaged in some sort of feud to begin with.
Example: Two neighbors engaged in a long-running dispute or feud where they keep provoking or harassing each other nonstop. When Neighbor A bashes Neighbor B in the head with a baseball bat someday, Neighbor B can’t exactly claim to have had this happen totally out of the blue.
The proper legal term for the legal theory applicable in these kinds of cases is “contributory assholishness”.
Not really; but it sure ought to be 
I really hate those stories. There’s a whole TV series dedicated to it called Neighborhood Wars. Complete insanity.
How about the victims of romance scams? On YouTube there’s a series called “Catfish” where the victims describe sending fortunes in gift cards and Bitcoin trying to get some unfortunate but handsome creature off an oil rig. Sometimes what they describe goes on for years.
Sometimes the victims say they blocked the scammer only to go back for more. Sometimes, they’ve been scammed dozens of times.
I mean, yeah anybody can be a vulnerable target, but come on! This US soldier in Afghanistan would starve if you don’t send him $500 in Sephora gift cards?
A very common comment I see on my scam-related content is ‘This is so obvious! If anyone falls for this, they deserve to be scammed’.
I would like to ask: Why do we even want to blame victims? What purpose is served by it?
IMO, a lot of it seems to be ego-stroking. Deriding a person who is deficient in some knowledge or awareness that we ourselves possess, makes us feel superior. Makes us feel safe in that superiority; we like to feel safe, and so there is psychological reward in telling ourselves that this bad thing could never happen to us, because we’re too clever to fall for it.
But everyone has vulnerabilities. Spotting someone else’s vulnerability when you see it exploited, and then checking that you don’t seem to have that specific vulnerability is, I suppose a good thing, because checking yourself is good, but to infer from that check that you have no vulnerabilities (which I think a lot of people do, in this context) is foolish and dangerous.
Everyone has vulnerabilities; even the best people have bad days; nobody is invulnerable, and imagining that you are invulnerable increases your risk - pride cometh before destruction and all that.
Safety doesn’t come from observing that you are smart and congratulating yourself about it, but rather, from recognising that you can fail.
Also there’s a Dunning-Kruger angle to this - for example I am a fairly keen gardener and amateur botanist; this means that some types of scam that are common in social media right now, are very blatantly obvious to me. I’m talking about online ads for seeds, where the picture of the plant shown is just implausible - this is a photo from one of those ads, claiming to sell seeds for blue roses:
It’s abundantly obvious to me that this is fake, because I have some knowledge in this specific domain (specifically, nothing in the rose family makes blue flowers and also, people don’t generally grow roses from seed anyway, because they don’t come ‘true’ from seed); this doesn’t necessarily make me ‘savvy’ in any other domain, where I don’t know what is possible, what things cost, how things work.
I might feel tempted to berate a person who bought these seeds, but if they don’t know what I happen to have learned, how are they supposed to avoid the scam? I was not born with this knowledge - I had to learn it - so how can I berate someone who has not learned it yet? - that was me once.
And here’s the Dunning-Kruger bit: it would be very easy for me to be spurred on by my self-congratulation about spotting this scam, and operate under the tacit assumption that I have some sort of general-purpose competence in avoiding scams, but if I was, say, shopping for a gift for someone, and that gift was in a category/domain that I know very little about, this (both the lack of knowledge, and the self-rated competence) would make it much easier for me to fall victim to a scam.
I had an experience like that once. I rejected a car scammer who claimed to be an Air Force servicewoman at “Salem Air Force Base in Oregon.” I thought, “Airbases are usually named after people, not locations” and felt good about myself for spotting her ruse. Yet I also, around that time, fell for two other, totally unrelated, scams.
I’ve spoken to a person whose professional competence in their career path greatly exceeds my own or that of anyone else I know (I can’t say anything about it, because I promised them complete anonymity - but think of the kind of roles where, every day, the life and safety of thousands of people depends on your skill and competence) - and this person fell for (what is, to me) a fairly obvious phishing scam.
It happened because it caught them at a low ebb, when their attention was focused elsewhere, and it was a lucky shot by the scammer - the scam was a fake call supposedly from the bank about a transaction, but it happened to coincide fairly closely with a genuine transaction that the person was trying to make - they assumed ‘this must be about that’ and got taken in.
And yet this is a person who is very intelligent, hugely competent and analytical. They tripped up at a moment where there happened to be a bad place to fall.
And we all have those momentary lapses of attention or judgment - usually these just manifest as something silly like putting your car keys in the fridge, then wondering why you did that, but the same lapse can have serious implications if the timing is right (by which I mean, wrong).
I mention this actually because the other thing I really dislike about victim-blaming is that it typically concludes a thought process.
There is a choice when you hear about an incident of the type we’re discussing in this thread:
Or
I’m not sure. Take the scam mentioned upthread: “I mean, yeah anybody can be a vulnerable target, but come on! This US soldier in Afghanistan would starve if you don’t send him $500 in Sephora gift cards?”
Imagine someone you know is about to get scammed out of that money. Imagine, too, that you in fact wouldn’t get scammed by it; but maybe you say nothing to them as they get scammed — and maybe you say nothing later, when they’re about to get scammed again — and then you see me step in with a warning that, oh, hey; that’s an obvious scam.
And they listen to me! And they’re ever so very grateful! I’ve saved the day! Yay me! Consider my ego stroked! And they ask you about this fraudulent scheme and, uh. what? Do you reply that, yeah, you figured, but you didn’t say anything? And maybe they believe you, and say they wish you’d said something when it would’ve helped — but maybe they don’t believe you, and think you’re dishonestly trying to sound like you knew all along but clearly didn’t or you would’ve spoken up — or: do you dishonestly reply that, why, no, you had no idea, because you want to look like you sure couldn’t figure out what I easily did?
If, as you say, it’s about ego, then: what would ego prompt you to do in such a situation, where you genuinely wouldn’t be scammed and they genuinely would?
I’m not really sure. Empathy and compassion might inspire you to help. Ego, I think, might make you want to watch from the sidelines as your inferior trips and falls, or I suppose it might as you say, want to take the credit for averting a disaster.
But you’re talking about a scenario where the thing hasn’t happened yet. I’m talking about the scenario where it has (which is the usual case with victim-blaming)
Well, I hoped to split the difference by talking about a scenario where it’s already happened and is about to happen again.
I think it’s an interesting question, but I reckon most victim-blaming occurs outside of a context where the person blaming could step in to help, assuming they wanted to - case in point with the romance scammer mentioned above - it’s a case documented in an online video - the majority of the people victim-blaming have no contact with the victim; no capacity in which they could step in and help.
Fear of being as vulnerable as the known victim. Literally reassuring themselves that they wouldn’t fall for the same thing because the victim is uniquely dumb or gullible.
Or the broader, more philosophical equivalent: Just World theory. In the Just World, victims deserve it because it would be unjust for someone who didn’t deserve it to be victimized. It happened, so it must have been deserved. (Which ties in with the prior reason, because in a Just World I don’t deserve to be victimized in that way, so I can be reassured I won’t be.)
Absolutely - if being safe is hard, our brains will settle for feeling safe.
And feeling safe is what you get for thinking that you’re not stupid, like that stupid person that had bad things happen to them, because they are stupid.
One circumstance in which it might be fair to blame the victim is if the victim was already clearly warned ahead but persisted anyway.
My aunt was like this. She was warned in no uncertain terms that something was a scam, yet sent him thousands of dollars anyway.
Yeah, I think also if the exact same thing keeps happening, over and over, in the same way. it might be true to say ‘you have nobody but yourself to blame’, but I’m not sure any actual purpose is really served by saying that, unless it is followed up by some sort of remedial action or change - it might as well not be said.
The criminal is always responsible for the crime, full stop.
That doesn’t change if someone behaves in a way to increase the risk of being victimized by a criminal, or if they are a bad or stupid person.
As far as I know, no crime has been alleged here. The rule of caveat emptor applies. You can blame bad investors for losing their money.
Now - I don’t know that Trump is able to run any kind of business without committing crimes. I would be surprised if the Truth Social debacle did not involve fraud. In that case, the investors are fraud victims and shouldn’t be blamed. Their stupidity doesn’t excuse Trump in any way, shape, or form.
Of course you can internally tut-tut and say they should have known. Laugh about it with your friends, whatever. I certainly will. But I wouldn’t say that to the people involved. I’d say they’re fraud victims and deserves all the restitution and justice that comes with that.
I guess it’s my fault for not being precise with my word choice. I’m using victim rather broadly and we can apply this idea about blaming to all sorts of non-criminal situations. If I were to be on the open market for a mate and started a serious relationship with a woman I knew was a serial cheater, well, whose fault is it when she cheats on me?
It depends on how you determine “fault”. The cheater is “at fault” for the cheating, no matter what. You possess the personality fault of being too trusting, but that doesn’t make you culpable for the cheating in any way, shape, or form.
Nope, those are victims and blaming them is wrong.
Exactly.
[quote=“Velocity, post:107, topic:999984”]
I had an experience like that once. I rejected a car scammer who claimed to be an Air Force servicewoman at “Salem Air Force Base in Oregon.” I thought, “Airbases are usually named after people, not locations” and felt good about myself for spotting her ruse.
[/quote]List of United States Air Force installations - Wikipedia
That is a good rule of thumb, but there looks to be quite a few exceptions. No “Salem” however.
Anyone can be scammed. When I was in college I was scammed- of only 10 bucks, sure, but I was.