S/O victim-blaming - why?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People are so desperate to be seen as victims. Our culture is obsessed with performative victimhood. Many so called victims are not. I reserve my sympathy for the real victims, not people who are simply desperate for attention or regret their bad decisions.

Why does every jerk on the internet act like 1. their sympathy is of any value and 2. sympathy is a limited resource?

Every other day I see some lower functioning being saying "I have NOOO SYMNPATHY for..." and OK...what would you like us to do with this information?

I guess some people just think of themselves as special.

People who feign victimhood are nothing more than pathetic attention seekers who exploit the sympathy of naive virtue signalers like yourself in order to gain attention and status.

Thanks for sharing, we'll be sure to pat your head and give you the attention that you deserve but other people don't. You're the smartest person in the room. No self-esteem problems at all. Well adjusted and normal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All of the above.

And also victim-blaming reinforces existing power structures, and most people will always seek to align themselves with the most powerful person. Even, it turns out, if that person is a known pedophile. Especially if he is?

If you don't see these dynamics happening at a smaller scale in your own life, you are likely not looking very hard.

+1
People side with abusers because (1) they want to be on the side of the powerful, (2) they agree that some people matter more than others, and/or (3) they want to believe that nothing bad will happen to them, so they tell themselves a story where bad things only happen to people who deserve them.

Very true. My mother’s boyfriend beat her, r*ped her, and she never acknowledged what he did as wrong. He then sexually assaulted me as an 8 year old and my 6 year old sister. I didn’t understand what happened so I didn’t tell her, but I did tell her a few years later when I did understand, and she told me that it was all our fault and that he would never…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Adults generally have agency, and with agency comes the reality that our choices can place us in certain situations. Agency means our choices matter, sometimes in ways that increase risk, even when harm remains unjustified. Life is rarely a single-cause event. Outcomes often arise from a combination of personal decisions and others’ actions.

People who victim-blame tend to believe people have a lot more agency than they do. Most people's lives are restricted in a wide variety of ways -- by money, limited options, their own knowledge and intelligence, social expectations, the influence of fear or other emotions which can cloud judgment.

People love to Monday-morning quarterback a terrible event and second guess every choice made by a victim or their family. With hindsight and full knowledge of the context, it may seem very obvious that someone should have done XYZ to prevent something bad happening. In the moment, people make the best choices they can with what's available to them. Sometimes people do things that seem very stupid in restrospect but if you were in the same situation, you might do the same thing. You're lucky you weren't in that situation.

We also know all kinds of things about how the chemical reactions in our brains react to threats. For a long time people thought the only responses were fight or flight, and we assumed that if someone didn't do one of those things, then they must have consented to a situation. Now we understand that our brains do all kinds of things to try and protect us. "Freeze" is perhaps the most common response to a threat, but it can look like passivity. "Fawn" is also common. These responses are not choices that a person makes with true agency, but a fear response to try and preserve physical or mental safety in the face of limited options. Victim-blamers will treat a freeze response like consent even when it's obvious not, they'll view fawning behavior as complicity.

Most people have limited agency, and certain demographics have even less than the average person -- children, immigrants/refugees, people with disabilities, the elderly, and people who have already survived other trauma. Yet people will look at crimes against these people and assume 100% agency and perfect knowledge, and ignore everything we know about how the human brain works, and blame the victim. All to keep a person with more power and more agency from being held accountable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think there is an inherent problem with how people define "victim blaming". Here is an example:

A person decides to walk down a city street late at night while holding a bunch of cash over their head and singing loudly. Someone robs them.

I say: "That person should have not walked down that street doing that". That statement is an undeniable truth. Their decision played a role in what happened. BUT...I am NOT blaming them. The fault lies solely on the person who robbed them. That person shouldn't have done a bad thing, not matter what.

Again, I'm not BLAMING the victim, but they did play a role and could have made better decisions (even though they shouldn't have to).

Do you still think I'm victim-blaming?

It’s really this.

I closely follow a case where a woman had a creepy colleague who was obsessed with her. One day he asked for a ride home and she gave it to him. He killed her. Did she deserve to die? Absolutely not. Did she play a role by agreeing to give her creepy stalker a ride? Yes.

Back in college I went on a sketchy date with an even sketchier stranger who asked me to lunch after a brief conversation in the campus bookstore, because I was dumb. If something would have gone terribly wrong, my role would have mattered in the outcome.

She "played a role" in her own murder because she agreed to give a colleague a ride home?

GTFO. I would argue you are much dumber than your college-age self accepting some sketchy lunch date if you actually believe that. I mean, why stop with the ride? Wasn't she complicit for continuing to work there even after the guy had been creepy? She should have quit her job and gone to work somewhere else. Or wait, should she even have started working there in the first place? She should have anticipated that one of her colleagues might have been a creepy killer and just gone to work somewhere else. Perhaps the error was in choosing that career path, whatever it was -- did she compare the psychological profiles of men in working in various fields and choose the one with the lowest rate of creepy or potentially dangerous behavior? Well that's on her then.

You sound like such an idiot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think there is an inherent problem with how people define "victim blaming". Here is an example:

A person decides to walk down a city street late at night while holding a bunch of cash over their head and singing loudly. Someone robs them.

I say: "That person should have not walked down that street doing that". That statement is an undeniable truth. Their decision played a role in what happened. BUT...I am NOT blaming them. The fault lies solely on the person who robbed them. That person shouldn't have done a bad thing, not matter what.

Again, I'm not BLAMING the victim, but they did play a role and could have made better decisions (even though they shouldn't have to).

Do you still think I'm victim-blaming?

It’s really this.

I closely follow a case where a woman had a creepy colleague who was obsessed with her. One day he asked for a ride home and she gave it to him. He killed her. Did she deserve to die? Absolutely not. Did she play a role by agreeing to give her creepy stalker a ride? Yes.

Back in college I went on a sketchy date with an even sketchier stranger who asked me to lunch after a brief conversation in the campus bookstore, because I was dumb. If something would have gone terribly wrong, my role would have mattered in the outcome.

She "played a role" in her own murder because she agreed to give a colleague a ride home?

GTFO. I would argue you are much dumber than your college-age self accepting some sketchy lunch date if you actually believe that. I mean, why stop with the ride? Wasn't she complicit for continuing to work there even after the guy had been creepy? She should have quit her job and gone to work somewhere else. Or wait, should she even have started working there in the first place? She should have anticipated that one of her colleagues might have been a creepy killer and just gone to work somewhere else. Perhaps the error was in choosing that career path, whatever it was -- did she compare the psychological profiles of men in working in various fields and choose the one with the lowest rate of creepy or potentially dangerous behavior? Well that's on her then.

You sound like such an idiot.

She’d likely still be here if she had said to herself, this guy is creepy and stalks me at work and I’m not giving him a ride. Now, if he chose to break into her house and murder her, that’s a different story.

[Anonymous]

Because people want to believe that others cause their own misfortunes. I have seen it happen in my life (hint: the abuser was my XH and the survivor was me). I was shocked at how parents and a few friends blamed me after I left him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because people want to believe that others cause their own misfortunes. I have seen it happen in my life (hint: the abuser was my XH and the survivor was me). I was shocked at how parents and a few friends blamed me after I left him.

Surely they weren’t blaming you for being abused, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think there is an inherent problem with how people define "victim blaming". Here is an example:

A person decides to walk down a city street late at night while holding a bunch of cash over their head and singing loudly. Someone robs them.

I say: "That person should have not walked down that street doing that". That statement is an undeniable truth. Their decision played a role in what happened. BUT...I am NOT blaming them. The fault lies solely on the person who robbed them. That person shouldn't have done a bad thing, not matter what.

Again, I'm not BLAMING the victim, but they did play a role and could have made better decisions (even though they shouldn't have to).

Do you still think I'm victim-blaming?

It’s really this.

I closely follow a case where a woman had a creepy colleague who was obsessed with her. One day he asked for a ride home and she gave it to him. He killed her. Did she deserve to die? Absolutely not. Did she play a role by agreeing to give her creepy stalker a ride? Yes.

Back in college I went on a sketchy date with an even sketchier stranger who asked me to lunch after a brief conversation in the campus bookstore, because I was dumb. If something would have gone terribly wrong, my role would have mattered in the outcome.

She "played a role" in her own murder because she agreed to give a colleague a ride home?

GTFO. I would argue you are much dumber than your college-age self accepting some sketchy lunch date if you actually believe that. I mean, why stop with the ride? Wasn't she complicit for continuing to work there even after the guy had been creepy? She should have quit her job and gone to work somewhere else. Or wait, should she even have started working there in the first place? She should have anticipated that one of her colleagues might have been a creepy killer and just gone to work somewhere else. Perhaps the error was in choosing that career path, whatever it was -- did she compare the psychological profiles of men in working in various fields and choose the one with the lowest rate of creepy or potentially dangerous behavior? Well that's on her then.

You sound like such an idiot.

She’d likely still be here if she had said to herself, this guy is creepy and stalks me at work and I’m not giving him a ride. Now, if he chose to break into her house and murder her, that’s a different story.

If he broke into her house, you'd blame her for having insufficient locks or security or for living in the wrong neighborhood or for choosing to live alone in the first place.

She would also still be here if her workplace had done anything about his creepy, stalking behavior. By allowing it to continue without addressing it, they sent the message that the guy's behavior was okay. Perhaps that made her second-guess herself in the moment. Did she complain to people at work about his behavior? How did they respond? There was a guy in my grad school who stalked me and asked me out many times even though I always said no, and I was told repeatedly by administration and by other students, "Come on, he's harmless -- he just has poor social skills." At one point after I'd turned him down yet again, another classmate actually told me I should just go out with him once to "throw him a bone." After that, had he asked me for a ride home from campus one day, I likely would have given him one. Because I'd been gaslit over his behavior and told many times that I was misinterpreting it, the was actually harmless, that I should just give in and be nice, that probably he was the victim because he was a guy who couldn't get a date and I was one of the withholding women preventing him from getting one.

[Anonymous]

Anyone blaming the victim is doing bad things in their own life and its a way of justifying it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think there is an inherent problem with how people define "victim blaming". Here is an example:

A person decides to walk down a city street late at night while holding a bunch of cash over their head and singing loudly. Someone robs them.

I say: "That person should have not walked down that street doing that". That statement is an undeniable truth. Their decision played a role in what happened. BUT...I am NOT blaming them. The fault lies solely on the person who robbed them. That person shouldn't have done a bad thing, not matter what.

Again, I'm not BLAMING the victim, but they did play a role and could have made better decisions (even though they shouldn't have to).

Do you still think I'm victim-blaming?

It’s really this.

I closely follow a case where a woman had a creepy colleague who was obsessed with her. One day he asked for a ride home and she gave it to him. He killed her. Did she deserve to die? Absolutely not. Did she play a role by agreeing to give her creepy stalker a ride? Yes.

Back in college I went on a sketchy date with an even sketchier stranger who asked me to lunch after a brief conversation in the campus bookstore, because I was dumb. If something would have gone terribly wrong, my role would have mattered in the outcome.

She "played a role" in her own murder because she agreed to give a colleague a ride home?

GTFO. I would argue you are much dumber than your college-age self accepting some sketchy lunch date if you actually believe that. I mean, why stop with the ride? Wasn't she complicit for continuing to work there even after the guy had been creepy? She should have quit her job and gone to work somewhere else. Or wait, should she even have started working there in the first place? She should have anticipated that one of her colleagues might have been a creepy killer and just gone to work somewhere else. Perhaps the error was in choosing that career path, whatever it was -- did she compare the psychological profiles of men in working in various fields and choose the one with the lowest rate of creepy or potentially dangerous behavior? Well that's on her then.

You sound like such an idiot.

You’re arguing against a position I didn’t take.
Saying someone “played a role” in the chain of events is not the same as saying they are morally responsible for what was done to them. The only person responsible for murder is the murderer.

But acknowledging that our choices can affect our exposure to risk is not victim-blaming, it’s reality. If I walk into a clearly dangerous situation, I am not guilty if someone harms me. The harm is still 100% on the perpetrator. That doesn’t mean my decision had zero causal relevance.

We make risk calculations every day: who we trust, where we go, who we’re alone with. Recognizing that isn’t endorsing violence or excusing it. It’s acknowledging that humans operate in a world where other humans have agency too, including bad actors.

Pretending victims have no agency at all doesn’t empower them. It just collapses the distinction between “fault” and “causation.”
If you want to argue that causation and moral responsibility are identical, make that argument directly. But don’t misrepresent mine.

[Anonymous]

Because it’s deeply embedded in our society that some people are disposable. Who exactly those disposable people are depends on your politics and other things, but the idea is there.

[Anonymous]

The patriarchy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because people desperately want to believe that nothing bad can happen to them.

+1.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All of the above.

And also victim-blaming reinforces existing power structures, and most people will always seek to align themselves with the most powerful person. Even, it turns out, if that person is a known pedophile. Especially if he is?

If you don't see these dynamics happening at a smaller scale in your own life, you are likely not looking very hard.

+1000000000000000000

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because people desperately want to believe that nothing bad can happen to them.

No, some people think about right/wrong, taking responsibility for one's decisions and actions, and possible consequences.