“16-year-old young girl viciously abused by boyfriend for over a month, her body as if cut by a thousand knives”
It is a news article translated from Chinese to English, but I have seen stories like this before, and I do not understand why so many people blame the victim.
How could anyone look at pictures like these, and then say such bad things about the victim ?
I don’t know, but I suspect that if the victim is to blame, the world makes a little more sense. Bad things only happen to bad people, therefore nothing bad will happen to me.
It’s a way of saying “I’m safe from such things. That can’t happen to me.”
Well clearly all she had to do say forcefully “I want you to calm down. Right. Now.” and everything would have been OK. She was with the guy for a month and apparently never did that. It’s a surefire method as outlined in this thread on how to deal with angry people.
Often it is a cultural thing: “men can do no wrong and women are evil” sort of beliefs. Other times it is projection: they accuse others of doing what they themselves would do. Finally, it can simply be a lack of human empathy, which in some minds is confused with weakness. Such people are often quick to judge and seldom forgive, even if they are proven wrong later.
Because it’s easier to judge others in black/white. It’s one thing to be unexpectedly beaten up by your partner, but then why did you stay with them unless you wanted it to happen again?
Real life includes lots of shades of grey. Yeah, Ok, leave the abuser and go…where? Got any money? Got any family? Got the means to get to them? Have they got room for you? Do you even have the means to support yourself when you leave? Do you dare call the police–what if they don’t haul him away. And if they do, what will you do when he’s released and comes back home? Best to play it down, and try not to ‘ask for’ another beating. That’s all too complex. Best to stick to black/white.
Or if it did happen to you, it was not abuse. It “built character” and taught you about the “real world,” “laws of nature,” etc.
I didn’t read all the comments on that article, but I didn’t see any that were blaming the victim. The closest I can see is things along the line of “She should have left him, and society/her parents are to blame for not encouraging that”.
Deserved it.
Give it a rest, this is simply a prostitute with a pervert, that girl isn’t anything good either [isn’t a saint either].
Deserved it. Already knew he was a punk and thug and you still got involved with him, didn’t you bring this upon yourself?? Find a man with a normal job to be a boyfriend and the chances of something bad happening would be much smaller. You were asking for it.
Yes, she was asking for it, but this guy deserves to die!
16 years old and already out working as a KTV hostess. These two people are both geniuses, truly a match.
There’s something wrong with this girl’s brain.
Cheap cunt! [a girl looking for trouble, tempting fate]
Now why did I click on that link? There is no explanation for this level of abuse other than sadism.
This is one possibility. Victim blaming can serve as a psychological defense mechanism - by telling oneself that the victim was complicit in the harm that came to them, the person lessens their fear of the same thing happening to them. It also works the other direction, when the person feels they may somehow be complicit in what happened to the victim, victim blaming can lessen the person’s feeling of guilt or psychological pain. For example, following the Kent State shootings, rumors abounded in the community that the four dead students had provoked the guardsmen into using deadly force (despite the fact that two weren’t even involved in the protest and were merely walking to class), that the bodies were so infested with lice and syphillis that they may have been dead soon anyway, that they stank so badly that ambulance drivers gagged, etc.
This too - it’s called the just world hypothesis.
I doubt there’s only one reason. I do think there’s another reason that is sort of related to the ‘just world’ idea: when people blame the victim, they are reassuring themselves that they could never end up in a situation like this, and that if they ever thought something crazy or abusive might possibly happen to them, they would instantly handle it the right way and end it. I’m not saying that something over-the-top insane like this could happen to absolutely anyone, but some people are uncomfortable with the idea of acknowledging the idea that they have weaknesses, too.
I do think that “It can’t happen to me. That only happens to bad people.” is a factor in many cases where victims get blamed (not just abuse situations), but I think it is too simplistic to attribute the victim blame in abuse situations entirely to that.
In other cases I think that it’s not that people are heartless but that some people do get frustrated with how hard it can be to get someone who is enmeshed with their abuser away from the situation. I think a lot of people out there have had the experience of trying to help a friend or relative get away from an abuser only to have the victim go back to the abuser shortly afterwards. It can be very upsetting to see that happen especially if you put yourself at personal risk to try to keep them apart, and it’s tempting to think “Well that must be what she wants then. I guess she deserves what she gets” (or he - since men can be abused too of course).
I’m not saying this is something I condone. There are psychological reasons for why abuse victims find it hard to leave. I just think it’s too simplistic to think that there is just one reason for why people think this way.
China society can be extremely harsh on women, especially outside of the major cities.
Women face limited career options, meaning that many women rely entirely on the goodwill of their husbands for sustenance, in what are often still semi-arranged marriages put together without a lot of concern for personal satisfaction. In such an economy, married women have a strong motivation to enforce scarcity value on sex, which is basically what they have to secure their place in the world. This leads to a “virgin-whore” dynamic, where women are either "good girls’ who get married and become doting housewives, or “bad girls” who live independently, which in an area with limited economic choices often means trading sex for money. “Good” women enforce this in order to maintain their competitive advantage, and men enforce it because it’s a part of the system that privileges them.
So women who have sex outside of marriage (and, as a karaoke hostess, that is the assumption) are seen as “outside of” society, and basically deserving of what they get. It’s much like someone here saying over a drive-by “Oh, I’m not going to shed a tear, He was a drug dealer and got what comes with the territory.”
The religion in which I was raised frames it like this: If you are good and righteous, God will bless you. If you are bad and sinful, God will punish you. Yes, this completely negates the whole point of the atonement, but nevermind that. The point is, if something bad happens to you, you weren’t righteous enough, and/or you sinned, so the “punishment” doled out by god is deserved. You had it comin’. If you were more faithful and prayed more often with sincere intent and resisted the temptation to sin, bad things wouldn’t have happened. Be good and righteous and you won’t have to worry about getting mugged, robbed, raped, or murdered because god blesses the faithful and punishes the unfaithful.
Yep. If it was his 5yo grandson who provoked Gramps into teaching him to masturbate in front of Gramps’ friends or the teenaged daughter/granddaughter who provoked the old man into trying to grope/rape her/set her up as a porn worker/pimp her out, it wasn’t the kid’s mother’s fault for ever letting him near the child.
I’ve also heard “but it wasn’t so bad!” and “well, that means you guys are now able to recognize his kind at a glance” (a knowledge I’d rather have done without).
I admit it. I have a tendancy to place a small portion of the blame onto the victim in any situation involving 2 adults. I just find it hard to accept that one party is 100% the perpatrator and one is 100% victim. I believe there is always something that could have been done to avoid or minimize the problem. When u have an auto accident the insurance company almost never finds one party 100% the victim. Whether its leaving an abusive situation at the first sign of abuse or simply not walking in that bad neighborhood at 2am there is usually something the victim could have done. I don’t see it as blaming the victim I see it as placing some responsibility on the victim. It does not excuse the perp but it also doesn’t allow for someone to throw up their arms and say look what happened to me.
For the most part, I believe it’s simply a matter of people having a hard time understanding why anyone would stay in an abusive relationship. On the surface it just seems so obvious that only an idiot would stay with someone who constantly insults them or hits them on occasion. Of course it’s more complicated than that but a lot of people don’t think beyond the surface.
Well, on top of everything else mentioned here, I think to a certain degree they just don’t want to have to deal with the abuser, so they talk themselves into thinking this abuser is not, in fact, abusive. It’s just easier for them to stick with the status quo sometimes than to improve things.