Why do we blame the victim?

[buttwhale]

I will never understand this, though I have been guilty of it in the past. One morning, a while back, I was listening to the radio station that we listen to each morning as we get ready for the day. They have a spot they do where people get to email (or even mail, I s'pose) their gripes, pet peeves, and things that just piss them off. Anyhoo,

Comments

[iskender]

I think you got it. Look up the classical concept of a scapegoat.

We scorn the weak because we fear being weak ourselves. Doing our best to create a cut-throat society where there are no second chances and where the strong do whatever the please, we know that one day it might be us on the receiving end.

And so we hate the victim, putting on them all our feelings of weakness, doubt, and frailty, and drive them out symbolically so as to reinforce our fiction of strength.

Basic ape psychology.

[buttwhale]

Yeah, it pretty much sucks.

I have made myself more of aware of this little phenomenon and am able to catch myself when I start to do it. It really makes me think about what I am doing and if I catch anyone else doing it I call them on it.

Victims already beat themselves up. They question their own actions and what they could have done to prevent the crime from occurring. I don't think we need to add to the stress.

It just seems that we wind up hating and punishing the victim far more than the perpetrator of the crime. It goes to the extreme of finding reasons to feel sorry for the criminal because of their poor upbringing and so on, but the victim should have known better. It truly boggles the mind.

[iskender]

I think sympathy for criminals and blaming the victim are two different phenomena, actually. The accusation of the latter gets thrown around when you express the former.

To bring up a personal anecdote, when there were people looting after Katrina, there were people clicking their tongues and shaking their heads, saying how people weren't decent anymore. To me, that was blaming the victim, but others saw it differently.

[iskender]

You might be interested, or might not be, since it's not an exact fit, but I wrote about the social psychology of all this, as I saw it, about three years ago:

This does not only mean that joy is obtained from the suffering of the punished. Joy is also derived from the suffering of the victim. His or her weakness permits a great opportunity--that of the survivors to show their strength. In this age as in any other, crime is no simple thing. The victim is glorified for innocence and pitied for weakness, but at the same time the survivors and punishers feel a superiority to the victim; hence the great mood of correction that exists around all courts