Later that night, Lisa was assaulted by Dan. Unsurprisingly, participants who exhibited stronger binding values were more likely to assign responsibility for the crime to the victim or suggest actions the victim could have taken to change the outcome. People who exhibited stronger individualizing values tended to do the opposite. But when the researchers manipulated the language of the vignettes, they found something interesting.
Niemi and Young manipulated the sentence structure in the vignettes, changing who was the subject of the majority of sentences, the victim or the perpetrator. Some groups were given vignettes with the victim in the subject position e. That suggests that how we present these cases in text can change how people think about victims. While Gilin notes that people are more likely to be sympathetic to victims that they know well, reading about crimes reported in the media can sometimes increase a tendency for victim blaming.
The victims people read about in the media are usually strangers to them, and those stories can trigger that cognitive dissonance between the ingrained belief in a just world and clear evidence that life is not always fair. Stories that focus on the perpetrator of the crime, however, could be less likely to provoke that reaction. At its core, victim blaming could stem from a combination of failure to empathize with victims and a fear reaction triggered by the human drive for self-preservation.
That fear reaction, in particular, can be a difficult one for some people to control. Niemi suggests that getting to the root of the problem might involve reframing the way we think about perpetrators as well as victims, particularly in cases of rape. Niemi explains that it can be hard, especially for the loved ones of perpetrators, to reconcile the fact that someone they know so well and see as such a good person could commit a crime that they see as monstrous.
In some cases, this might lead to over-empathizing with perpetrators and focusing on their other achievements or attributes, as with coverage of the Stanford rape case in which Brock Turner was sometimes described as star swimmer instead of as an accused rapist.
As a society, we also tend to want to blame the victim because it reduces our own anxieties about our sisters, wives, mothers, daughters, and other loved ones. Shame and self-blame interferes with healing from the effects of traumatic events.
I see it every day in my practice, helping those in active addictions to alcohol or drugs confront the underlying trauma that helps drive their addiction.
Shame is one of the most devastating of emotions, and unfortunately it is self-inflicted, much of the time, with a lot of help from negative messages that are reinforced by other people and from society in general.
Shame is an emotional cancer. Avoiding emotional vulnerability creates shame, and when we avoid vulnerability, we avoid being our authentic selves by failing to acknowledge that we are not always strong, or perfect. People who have been victims of sexual assault will often try to explain it as their fault, avoiding the sense that they were truly powerless to stop the assault; this denial of their vulnerability introduces shame. Facing that vulnerability is one of the important steps in healing, and it causes the shame to drop away.
Our first reaction, to blame the victim, is clearly no longer the right action. As a result, we blame the victims of misfortune. But even in the face of clear evidence of guilt by perpetrators, victims of domestic violence feel compelled to justify their actions. Rape and sexual assault survivors are asked about what they wore and how they fought back. Despite MeToo and rising resistance to record inequality, victim-blaming remains a constant undercurrent.
Research suggests that this is actually an odd side-effect of the human desire for fairness. Understanding why could lead to new ways to fight back. First formulated by Melvin Lerner in the early s, the just-world bias can be seen in any situation in which victims are blamed for their own misfortune, whether it be abuse, sexual assault, crime or poverty.
When the learner — actually an actor — gave a wrong answer, she received painful electric shocks. Afterwards, observers were asked to describe how they felt about the victim, how likable or morally worthy she appeared to be. One group of women that just saw the victim get repeatedly shocked tended to derogate her. But another group, which before being asked to characterize the victim was told that she was not seriously harmed, did not engage in victim-blaming. In order to reduce the threat, they saw the victim as deserving of her fate.
Studies by others on various types of victimization — including poverty — have since borne these ideas out.
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