I’ve been following along in this ATMB thread, and I am a bit confused on where Dopers see the line between prudent advice and victim-blaming.
A snippet from one post particularly stuck out to me:
So, please help my unwoke self understand where you folks draw the line between prudent advice and victim-blaming. I’ll give some possible examples, and you can maybe tell me which ones you think cross the line into victim-blaming:
You should look both ways before crossing the street.
You should have looked both ways before crossing the street. You didn’t, and now your leg is broken in three places.
You should try to avoid getting black-out drunk at frat parties in college.
He should probably not have gotten blackout drunk at that frat party last Friday night. Now he’s got a dick drawn on his forehead in permanent marker.
She should probably not have gotten blackout drunk at that frat party last Friday night. Now she’s been sexually assaulted.
I suspect everyone agrees that #5 is victim-blaming, and perhaps #4 and #2. What about #3 and #1? Are those statements offensive? Is the critical difference in giving advice prior to a negative consequence vs. assigning blame after the fact? I guess I’m getting tripped up on “I do not believe that women generally … should even be responsible for [protecting themselves]”. I mean, I can agree that in an ideal world it shouldn’t be necessary, but in our real world, some choices leave one more at risk than others (crossing the street without looking vs looking both ways). Is that an outrageous observation to make in 2019?
One obvious line is that you can only advise someone to take steps to protect themselves against something that hasn’t already happened. It’s the line between “You should…” and “You should have…”
Another line: Something like your #5 does, or at least can, make getting assaulted sound like a natural consequence of getting blackout drunk at a frat party, thereby removing the responsibility of the assaulter. It’s victim-blaming if you’re not blaming the person who actually did the bad thing.
Sometimes I leave the keys in my door lock. Usually when my hands are full. Whenever I discover that they have been there all night long, a shiver runs up my spine. And I curse myself for being so careless.
Do I need a lecture on how stupid it is to leave my keys in the door? I do not think so. If I ever end up being a victim of crime because I make this kind of mistake, I don’t need someone telling me, “Hey, not to victim-blame, but you really shouldn’t leave your keys in the door lock! Don’t do that again!”
I see black-out drunkness the same way. Getting that drunk is not safe behavior no matter where you are or who you are. Urging young people to moderate their alcoholic consumption so that they stay aware of their surroundings is not victim-blaming, just like it isn’t victim blaming to remind them of the importance of keeping up with their keys at all times. But once the lapse in judgement has happened and badness results, there is no need for do anymore lecturing.
I think where I would personally put the line is what I would tell my son or daughter. And believe me, there would be blame set upon the person who did the said thing and me assigning a different kind of blame on my child.
You know better or should know better than to get blackout drunk at a frat party is fine in isolation. Assigning blame after the fact, I would say the exact same thing without the added and now you got sexually assaulted. But now someone sexually assaulted you maybe?
For context, I’d like to talk about a terrible accident that happened in Hypotheticalville last Friday night, where a truck driver who was at the tail end of a 20-hour drive plowed into a pedestrian crossing the street, killing him instantly. The chances are enormous that if the truck driver had been well-rested, she wouldn’t have hit the pedestrian, but she was trying to complete a route under the conditions her employer gave her. There are far too many accidents like this, and I propose that we change the labor laws such that no driver may work more than 10 hours in a 24-hour period.
If you respond to this thread by saying, “You should look both ways before crossing the street,” I’ll be real irked. That’s victim blaming.
For context, I want to talk about how to teach road safety to my five-year-old. I’m looking for a list of simple, easy-to-understand rules she can follow.
If you respond to this thread by saying, “You should look both ways before crossing the street,” I’ll gladly accept it. That’s totally appropriate.
Context is key. And far too often, people respond to posts like the Hypotheticalville one with advice for victims, which is super messed up.
IMO, victim blaming is when you remove culpability from the perp because of some action of the victim. None of the examples you give are necessarily victim blaming, it would depend on the context in which they were brought up.
And in the ATMB thread, by “responsible” I meant responsible for the rape itself. ETA: responsible for the rape that occurred after failing to protect herself
There’s another thing that I see pretty often, which is, people giving brain-dead obvious advice. When people get blackout drunk at a frat party, it’s not because they think doing so is a wise, measured, and prudent response to their situation. They know it’s a terrible idea. Your advice is not adding anything to their knowledge.
Unless you’re talking to kindergarteners, avoid the obvious advice.
Rape is always 100% the fault of the rapist. There are zero cases of a rapist not raping someone who has been raped.
As to getting blackout drunk at a frat party or doing something else that’s stupid, all the victim is guilty of is doing a stupid thing. Still the rapist’s fault.
It was stupid to get drunk enough to pass out at that frat party is not victim blaming.
You got raped because you got drunk and passed out at a frat party is victim blaming.
It was stupid to let that stranger into your apartment is not victim blaming.
You got raped because you let a stranger into your apartment is.
Context is key. If we’re discussing Brock Turner’s sentencing, there’s pretty much no reason to post that sentence except to engage in victim-blaming. Nobody on earth will read that thread, read that sentence, and say, “Holy shit, mind=blown, I never thought of that before, it really isn’t a good idea to get blackout drunk at a frat party!”
In the ATMB thread we were talking about how people here posted in an eight year old thread about a serial child rape victim with multiple perps. Some of the responses were to the effect that we should teach our daughters to go to an authority figure (parents, police) when touched inappropriately. Most of the thread was about asking, where were this girl’s parents? Why didn’t the community report anything until a sex video went viral in the schools? What can I teach my daughter to prevent this from happening to her?
Not too much about condemning the rapists themselves, and it appears that some interpret the uneven focus to be victim blaming. I do not. I think it is implied and understood that the rapists were in the wrong, and talking about the victim’s parents, behavior, and community does not constitute victim blaming.
I’m not going to dig through a second thread to find a link to a third thread to find the posts you’re talking about. Are there specific posts in which people said these things, and are there specific posts where they were accused of victim-blaming for posting these things?
Respectfully, I think that would be off-topic for this thread. My main point was that the context of the snippet in the OP was in fact about talking to kindergartners.
I’m confused. Unless there was literally a five-year-old poster in the thread, it was perhaps talking about pedagogical approaches.
To be clear, if there are circumstances in which child rape is unreported because a school refuses to have personal safety lessons that teach children how to report assault, then it’s appropriate to chastise the school for that. But nothing I’ve read makes me think that chastising schools for insufficient safety lessons is what got called victim-blaming.
Right, pedagogical. Just where the victim blaming was is something I’m trying to understand in the ATMB thread. I don’t think it would be appropriate to comb over specific posts here when that’s what I’m trying to do up there. Nobody here is making those claims.
I don’t think it’s a good analogy, because there are plenty of situations that we could dream up for this , where the blame for the accident is rightly apportioned between the driver and the pedestrian, because the pedestrian did something negligent, and the driver was obeying the law, albeit with slowed reactions due to fatigue, etc… I mean, it could easily be that the driver was driving at 30 mph in a 35 mph zone and an oblivious pedestrian fiddling with their phone walked out in front of them without warning, and inside the stopping distance of the truck. Whose fault is it then? Seems to me in that case, the truck driver didn’t intentionally do anything to harm or act negligently, and the pedestrian did.
I think a key component to the idea of victim blaming is that there was a deliberate action on the part of the predator(?) to actively do something negative to the victim- steal, rape, assault, etc… that the predator should not do in the first place, regardless of what the victim has done, and not just some sort of everyday inadvertent misfortune. So if the truck driver was speeding, or ignoring safety regulations, then that would likely count.
You’re correct, of course, that in my hypothetical the driver isn’t nearly as much at fault as a rapist is. But I’m not sure that matters for the underlying point, which is that it’s inappropriate to shift discussion back to the wisdom of the victim’s behavior, when what should be discussed is how to prevent the assailant’s behavior (whether or not that assault is intentional).
In my hypothetical, it’s a dick move to talk about how the pedestrian messed up. It’s far, far more of a dick move when we’re talking about a rapist instead of a sleepy truck driver.
(And note that I used that analogy to show that HD’s example of looking both ways before crossing the street could, given the wrong context, be victim-blaming. It’s not just randomly-chosen ).
I will stipulate that getting black-out drunk, especially in public, is really unwise behavior. That we should teach everyone, male and female, to never get black-out drunk, especially not in public. If someone doesn’t wear a seatbelt and gets hit by a drunk driver at a red light and killed, well, the accident wasn’t their fault, but I am going to point out to my kid that if they’d been wearing their seatbelt, they might be okay. I am NOT going to mention that to the victim’s mom.
That said, it’s all the things BESIDES getting black-out drunk that are problematic. The things that either don’t actually encourage rape, or are so life-limiting as to be ridiculous. These are things like
[ul]
[li]Don’t wear revealing clothes. There is NO evidence that rapists chose victims based on clothing. Zero. It’s a piece of “common sense” up there with “running the fan all night will kill you” and “leaving the house with wet hair will give you a cold”. There’s zero evidence. But it gets repeated all the time.[/li]
[li]Don’t hang out with strangers you don’t trust. This is axiomatic. How do you know who you can trust? Rapists are often people you know well. This is a way to blame the victim, by saying she should have known who was trustworthy. There’s an implication that either she did know, deep down, and sorta wanted it, or that there’s a defect in her.[/li]
[li] Say no. This is the one that is pulled out when the charge is that the rapist didn’t know, didn’t understand, couldn’t be held responsible. That she led him on, sent mixed signals, knew what she was getting into. Victims are held to a incredibly high standard to communicate perfectly, even though there’s no reason to think that rapists don’t know what they are doing.[/li]
[/ul]
Then there are things that are theoretically possible, but are incredibly life limiting:
[ul]
[li]Don’t travel alone[/li][li]Don’t drive long distances alone[/li][li]Don’t work late with a man[/li][li]Don’t travel for work with a man[/li][li]Don’t shop where you will have to walk across a parking lot or parking garage alone after dark.[/li][li]Don’t walk to your car at work alone after dark[/li][li]Don’t walk in your neighborhood or across your campus after dark alone[/li][li]Don’t go to a party alone, or leave alone, or join with a group of strangers[/li][li]Don’t have more than 3-4 drinks over a long evening in public[/li][li]Don’t be alone with a man until you’ve had several group dates[/li][li]Don’t let a man into your apartment unless you want to have sex with him[/li][li]Don’t go into rowdy places–bars, concerts–alone.[/li][/ul]
So I will give you “don’t get shit-faced, falling down drunk in public”. I think that’s good advice for everyone. But it’s intellectually dishonest to act like all victim blaming is about that. You need things on your list like:
[ul]
[li]Were you wearing tennis shoes when you got run over?[/li][li]Did you really need to cross the street at that crosswalk? Couldn’t you have just gone to the gas station down the street instead?[/li][li]Are you sure you didn’t duck when the car came around the corner?[/li][li] Don’t you drive a car, too?[/li][li]Have you thought about the impact of a reckless homicide charge on the driver’s life?[/li][/ul]
Context matters: Did he step out without looking? Was he at a crossing or did he try to run across the middle of the road? Who had the right of way? Would the car driver have reasonable expectations of the pedestrian’s actions and of stopping in time? Depending on the answers in a case by case analysis, absent evidence of driver’s negligence, the pedestrian’s fault may be the correct conclusion, despite him suffering the worst of the outcome. Also, the concepts of “accident” and “no-fault” assessments play a significant role.
Good advice.
Embarrassing but hardly a victim of a crime.
A crime has been committed. Rape is not an “accident”.
You can be a victim of a crime regardless of how much precaution you take to avoid being one. That’s the difference. Therefore, judging what role the victim has played in not being sufficiently prepared to avoid becoming the victim is an entirely wrong way to think about it.
I see much of this resulting from “old school” mindsets. I was exposed to this “way of life” all during my growing years.
They like binary thinking.
Bad thing happened? You asked for it or you didn’t work hard enough or didn’t do the “right” thing.
Good thing happen? You must have done something right. Bravo.
Shades of grey elude them.
This mindset absolves one of critical thinking.
I fear we will always have these people with us.
).