Blaming the Victim

Victim blaming is the act of attributing fault, in whole or in part, to a person or group damaged by a social or physical context or situation. It can include those hurt in an accident; victims of crime, mental illness, poverty, or nonfunctional education; and those with [Page 87]“undesirable” physical or cognitive characteristics. Victim blaming can be an inherent side effect of societal and professional remediation, treatment, or both. The act of blaming the victim rests on the belief that individuals are at least partially responsible for safeguarding themselves against foreseeable threats and dangers; therefore, from this perspective, individuals who fail to protect themselves are at least partly responsible for their status.

This premise operates as the basis for many social attitudes, practices, and policies regarding culpability in several spheres. For instance, home buyers are expected to inspect prospective properties for structural damages and weaknesses before finalizing purchases. If a home buyer fails to do so, such an individual must bear some responsibility for any problems with the house predating its purchase. Another example, in the case of natural disaster, is victims who failed to avoid a foreseeable catastrophe. This is also exemplified in cases of critique targeting refugees who are displaced by war and civil unrest yet had refused to abandon their homes in earlier periods of convenience or peace. More generally, it is the act of attributing culpability to individuals who suffer in a variety of contexts. Further, this process may be exacerbated by ameliorative or rehabilitative interventions. This act of attributing fault to victims because of perceived negligence or lack of vigilance against preventable damages is derogatorily referred to as “blaming the victim,” especially when organizations are attempting to “help.”

William Ryan coined the phrase “blaming the victim” in a 1971 book with that title in a criticism of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action by Daniel Moynihan. The so-called Moynihan Report attributed the social conditions and problems of black Americans to poor family structure and the overde-pendence of blacks on formal social systems, the latter of which Moynihan traced back to slavery. Ryan explained that in the context of the Moynihan Report, which was written by a liberal ideologue, blaming the victim is an ideological process that excuses or even justifies injustices and inequities by focusing on the imperfection of the victim. Blaming the victim then ultimately serves the group interests of those who practice it by displacing culpability for social problems from themselves and allowing the practitioner to enjoy the privileges resulting from sustaining the status quo.

Victim blaming has also received considerable attention from the social psychology field. In the 1972 work Causal Schemata and the Attribution Process, H. H. Kelley supposed that individuals can make one of two causal attributions for a person's behavior or circumstance. Individuals can identify personal characteristics as causes for negative outcomes, or they can attribute their conditions to environmental or sit-uational factors. People tend to make external attributions when referring to their own failures or misfortunes yet make internal attributions when referring to their accomplishments or good fortunes. The tendency is the opposite when referring to the successes or failures of others. Victim blaming is therefore a fundamental attribution error, meaning individuals overemphasize personal characteristics and de-emphasize environmental factors in making judgments of others.

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