Blaming the Victim

When people hear about bad things happening to people, they often try to make sense of it by asking themselves questions such as “why did this happen?” or “how could such a thing happen?” A person hearing about a woman being raped, for example, might answer the why and how questions by supposing that she could have been dressed provocatively and, therefore, might have brought the rape on herself. That person is engaging in victim blaming. When the victim herself begins to ask the why and how questions, she might also blame herself, and this self-blame can make it harder for her to adjust to the traumatic event. Both of these blaming responses confuse the purported cause of the traumatic experience with responsibility for its occurrence. Causes, responsibility, and culpability (blame) are not the same thing.

This mistake of conflating cause and effect can happen at individual, family, group, community, and societal levels. Blaming can occur among perpetrators of harm and among victims of harm, as well as by bystanders. At the individual level, a common mistake is to blame the rape victim for her clothing or for being out late at night. At the family level, it can result in dismissing the child who has been abused by a parent when the child “tells” the other parent. An example of community and societal blaming of victims happened following the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. The people of New Orleans were blamed for not having evacuated the city before the hurricane devastated it, even though many of the [Page 53]residents did not have any means to leave. Blaming the victim is relevant to the study of trauma because one cannot hope to understand the social cost of natural and interpersonally caused crises without understanding the loss of stability and revictimization that occurs when victims are deemed to be culpable for their own misfortune.

In the following sections, some possible explanations for victim blaming are presented from various theoretical perspectives; the differences among diverse groups as blamers and blamed are explored; and examples of blaming the victim by different groups in several different situations are described.