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"Blaming the victim is an act of refuge and self-deception. It allows the blamer to sit in judgment, imagining some mystical justice that means bad things happen only to bad people, thus ensuring their own safety."
Una, Becoming Unbecoming

This page is an overview of the concept of "victim blaming", for those who want to know more about victim blaming in a meta sense for their own writing (and for possibly avoiding it if it's unintended or being more aware in its use if it is intended). For fictional examples of victim blaming, please go to Good Victims, Bad Victims or Blaming the Victim.

Definition

"Victim blaming" is, simply put, the concept of placing the responsibility for a misfortune primarily or entirely on the victim of the misfortune. "Victim blaming" almost always refers to when someone who was hurt by someone or something did not actively contribute to the misfortune, yet is still being blamed for their own misfortune.

This is often a trigger, especially for people who have had or who know someone who has had experiences similar to a blamed victim.

Victim blaming can be used by writers In-Universe to establish a character through obviously or subtly engaging in it, characters avoiding it or challenging it, or narrative implications about victimization.

Why Do People Blame Victims?

Victim blaming gives non-victims the illusion of control over their own fate, by reassuring them that bad things only happen to people who "deserve" it or "choose to bring it upon themselves" because they didn't "do the right thing"note  — giving them hope that bad things won't happen to them if they "do the right thing".

At the root of this desire for comfort and hope is the fact that bad things happen to people who don't "deserve" it. This means that people cannot fully control whether they become victims, i.e. anyone can become a victim.

This line of reasoning applies hindsight to situations that aren't as predictable as they believe, causing people to mistake victims' causal fault for moral fault.

Obvious Victim Blaming

Obvious victim blaming is directly accusing the victim of a misfortune of causing it. Having a character do this will establish them as a Jerkass at best. Using your narrative to do so may establish you as the jerkass.

Some examples of obvious victim blaming:

  • Blaming a rape victim for being raped due to promiscuity, alcohol or drug use, state of dress, being out after a certain hour, etc.
  • Blaming people with unwanted pregnancies as "deserving it" for not using birth control, or not getting an operation to sterilize themselves, or even having sex in the first place.
  • Blaming disaster victims because they live in an area prone to disasters, prepared insufficiently, and/or "didn't evacuate".
  • Blaming a victim of theft/robbery/larceny/mugging for carrying things people would want to steal, putting it "in plain sight", for even having things a thief would want to steal in the first place, for being out after a certain hour, going into a certain area, etc.
  • Blaming [X] "sinful behavior" for [Y] disaster (though this is almost exclusively the purview of The Fundamentalist).
  • Blaming the victim for reacting negatively to hurtful things said to them/about them (whether intentional or not) by telling them that they need to suck it up or that the hurtful things that were said were not meant to be taken seriously.
  • Blaming a Domestic Abuse victim for somehow provoking their abuser into violence. Abusers themselves are often known to say things like "Why Did You Make Me Hit You?" to portray their actions as never their fault.
  • Blaming a Domestic Abuse or Child Abuse victim for "letting them do it" and "not standing up to themselves".
  • Blaming a victim of sibling abuse that they were "being annoying" or "escalating" conflicts.
  • Blaming the golden child for being the golden child.
  • Telling The Unfavorite they must have done something to deserve it.
  • Blaming a Domestic Abuse or familial abuse victim for "not running away" or "not leaving them". The alternative is often homelessness, which means they've traded a new set of problems for their old ones.
  • Blaming a Domestic Abuse victim for having "poor taste in partners".
  • Blaming a single parent for "choosing" someone who would "run out" on them.
  • Blaming a victim of Parental Abandonment as somehow "causing" it.
  • Blaming a victim of bullying for "letting themselves get bullied", telling them to just fight backnote , pointing out the reason they were being bullied, accusing them of making a big deal out of nothing, or excusing the bully's actions or motivations.
  • Related to the above, blaming the teachers because they "could prevent it, but don't" or are "following orders". Teachers have rules to follow, and breaking them can easily get them fired. That being said, criticising the failures of the school, especially if staff do have the power to stop bullying, but do nothing to stop it, is not victim blaming.
  • Blaming a victim of white-collar crime such as identity theft that they "shouldn't have been so trusting" or "For buying from shady people".
  • Blaming a victim of homo-/transphobia for being openly expressive in public, such as a same-sex couple holding hands, a Camp Gay man, Butch Lesbian, openly transgender person, etc.
  • Blaming an ethnic or religious group who have been conquered and oppressed for their second class or fallen status by using survival of the fittest as an excuse or finding dark or negative elements in their history or culture and saying that those were far worse than anything done today.
  • Blaming someone living in a country that is oppressive or violent to them for "not moving out".
  • Blaming a victim of assault for "taunting" or "provoking" their assaulter in some way.
  • Blaming someone for "falling for a taunt/provocation".
  • Blaming someone for "escalating" a situation.
  • Blaming a person who was lied to for "believing it" or "falling for it".
  • Blaming a victim of Police Brutality because they committed a crime, or if they didn't, for looking like they were doing something illegal.
  • Blaming a scam victim and calling them "stupid" for falling for such a ruse. Scammers make their money by tailoring their con to a victim's specific vulnerabilities and are much more savvy than the stereotypical "Nigerian Prince" or "hot singles in your area".
  • Blaming someone's woes of buying a lemon as buying from an Honest John's Dealership, from a bad brand, and "You should have known better".
  • Blaming parents for "not watching their children" when their children did things behind their backs.
  • Blaming a victim of an online sexual encounter gone south (robbed, extorted, murdered, etc.) for seeking casual sex in the first place.
  • Blaming a victim of stalking for "putting so much info out there" or for making themselves able to be stalked.
  • Blaming a victim of a catfish for being "naive" or "gullible".
  • Telling someone who is being harassed that they "shouldn't be so sensitive".
  • Blaming a victim of workplace abuse (including gig/contract work) for "not quitting" or pursuing other lines of work, or for somehow not pursuing full-time work. Getting a job is much, much harder than it sounds, and many people take gig work because it's the only job that they can get. Certain industries — entertainment being the most notable example — are pretty much staffed by contract/gig work.
  • Blaming someone who has debt for university / medical school / law school for "knowing what they were getting into", as if the decision to better your life with schooling is somehow bad.

Subtle Victim Blaming

Subtle victim blaming is accusing the victim not of directly causing their misfortune, but of enabling it or bringing it upon themselves via unrelated actions.

Some examples of this:

  • Telling someone their misfortunes reflect their attitudes or actions: not having a consistently positive and thankful mental attitude, not praying enough/not being devoted enough/not thanking people enough, or not being submissive enough to an authority the blamer values, such as a parent, leader, spouse, etc.
  • Saying that "true victims/survivors" only act in a certain prescribed way, and if someone isn't expressing themselves in a stereotypical idea of a victim, they aren't a "real" victim.
  • Questioning the reactions of a victim, also known as the "Why didn't you do something different?" argument. The core idea is that the victim could have done something to stop it, but didn't, thus it's their own fault for "letting it happen".
    • This mindset involves an oversimplified understanding of the "fight or flight instinct", referring to the adrenaline rush that gives people the necessary energy and strength to either run from or fight off a threat; a more accurate idiom is "fight, flight, or freeze, with "freeze" actually being the most common reaction. Further explanation 
    • There’s also the “fawn” response, when a victim tries to placate the offender in order to de-escalate or avoid further escalation in violence. Strategic submission is not consent, but outsiders might confuse the two.
  • Placing responsibility on someone for not heeding warnings regarding "missing stairs" — known problematic individuals in a social group or subcultural scene (usually sexual predators) who people are privately warned about, but who are never publicly outed or confronted. Apparently, victims are supposed to regard every rumor as truth and "just know" if someone is a predator. This form of victim blaming also serves to either downplay or completely ignore the predator's responsibility for their own actions, as well as the group for tacitly condoning it by allowing them to continue to be a part of it.
  • Insinuating a victim of identity theft or a credit card breach was "buying from shady sellers", was "buying illicit substances/material", was pirating material, or was buying porn. This not only excuses the people who did the actual crime (Identity theft), but it also ignores the reality of such white collar crime: that most of it actually happens in completely legitimate places and via data breaches.
  • Telling someone who was a victim of robbery/mugging that they "shouldn't have carried so much money on them". While it may have technically been true once upon a time, the increasing amount of cashless businesses have made wallet/purse or phone theft an increasingly common and damaging crime since these often contain credit or debit cards with direct access to a checking account.
  • Telling someone who had an expensive item stolen/destroyed that they "shouldn't have had something that expensive to begin with" or that they "invited it to be stolen". Essentially, it's telling someone who had their property stolen/damaged/destroyed that these things only happen to people who own nice things.
  • Telling someone whose insurance didn't cover something that they "should have gotten better insurance" or "got what they paid for". Insurance is known for using loopholes to avoid payouts. Sometimes, insurance that will cover almost everything is so expensive that you ironically don't need it since you could afford to replace it.
  • Blaming a business owner who was robbed that they needed to have merchandise insured. This dismisses the choice the robber made, and lets their insurer off the hook for flaking out.
  • Blaming someone who is gay and/or transgender and didn't disclose it for being attacked by a sex partner who reacted badly to learning that status. In many cases, the victim and only the victim is blamed for non-disclosure, with no criticism whatsoever towards the assailant. Over the years, the "gay-panic" and "trans-panic" defenses have allowed for the acquittal of many homophobic/transphobic murderers; and were for so long (and tragically in some places, still are) considered to be a sure-fire "Get Out of Jail Free" Card for their crimes.
  • Accusing someone who became addicted to a substance or mentally ill of being "weak-willed".
  • Blaming someone's Weight Woe on lack of "willpower" or lack of "self-discipline".
  • Calling someone with an eating disorder "vain", "shallow", etc.
  • Calling a person who attempts or completes suicide "selfish", "cowards", "negative thinkers", "sinners", etc.
  • Blaming someone for ignoring red flags or the concerns of others ("I told you so").
  • Saying "What goes around comes around", or "Well, now you know how so-and-so felt", or "karma" to someone who experienced a misfortune. People make mistakes, people do bad things — nobody's perfect. But when misfortune happens to them, saying phrases like those insinuates that they somehow did something to deserve it.
  • Informing a victim of Disproportionate Retribution that they deserved it. This essentially lets the one who performed the Disproportionate retribution off the hook.
  • Telling a victim of harassment/Cyberbullying to "just ignore them" or "log off". Further explanation 
  • Telling a victim of stalking that they should have contacted the authorities. [[labelnote:Further explanation]]Much like ignoring a harasser, this can actually embolden stalkers. By getting authorities involved, some stalkers will up the ante to show that you can't get rid of them this easily — even if they do face legal repercussions.
  • Telling someone about how you were in a similar situation and did something to assess it, or how you handled it When I Was Your Age.... Your advice that worked even as little as a few years ago will not work in every situation — nor will it even work now.
  • Telling someone who is expressing annoyance or outrage at an item or not being available for whatever reason that they could have gotten it already. There may be multiple reasons as for why someone never got an item that has been removed from circulation, i.e. money, availability, or simply never expecting it to be removed from circulation in the first place.
  • Related to the above, saying you already got yours. This is insinuating that they "should have" gotten the item or service and somehow chose not to.
  • Responding to complaints about harassment or a toxic community with comments like "toughen up", "That's what it's like", or "Well, you can't police what people say". This still largely places the onus on the person receiving harassment, and is dismissing the people who are choosing to harass them.
  • Telling a victim of harassment that "actions speak louder than words". The choice to run your mouth is still a conscious choice, and running your mouth is still very much an action.
  • Saying "I don't care who started it". This lets the aggressor off the hook. Essentially letting them know that they can start fights or harass people all they want — the person who retaliated learns not to defend themselves
  • Telling someone who retaliates against harassers that they "shouldn't sink to their level".
  • Dismissing crimes that happen in certain areas as "It's a bad neighbourhood/city" and thus It Can't Be Helped. This insinuates that people who go to those areas somehow deserve to be the victim of a crime, because that's what happens there.
  • Insinuating that people who had items stolen/damaged/destroyed didn't "properly secure them" or "didn't lock them up". Since locks cannot be destroyed or picked according to this line of thought, or that people couldn't simply just break in.
  • Telling hurricane/cyclone victims they had [X] amount of time to evacuate and didn't. This isn't taking into account that hurricanes can be quite unpredictable — it's not uncommon for hurricanes to change course and suddenly hit another area and give the people as little as 12 hours to evacuate. This also ignores that some people may have trouble evacuating, or aren't able to, e.g. they are "essential workers" such as first responders.
  • Telling people who live in areas prone to natural disasters that they should "just move out" or that they "shouldn't even live there". Many people live in places like these because of things like their jobs.
  • Implying that someone's financial or workplace troubles are because they are not "working hard/smart enough".
  • Implying that someone expressing woes about a defective product bought from a bad brand".
  • Telling someone with a broken product that they didn't take proper care of it or "used it wrong". While it might be justifiable if someone is say, playing catch with a pair of binoculars, sometimes things may be simply manufactured incorrectly. This also is ignoring planned obsolescence, where products are only designed to last a particular amount of time, and it is becoming much more common.
  • Blaming former enablers who saw their situation for what it was for "abandoning" the people they enabled.
  • Trauma gatekeeping (openly or implicitly stating that someone's trauma does not matter because someone else went through worse/they are from a privileged background/they have access to therapy/etc.).
  • Telling someone things like "Sticks and stones can break your bones but words will never hurt you", "They're just words — they can't hurt you", "If there's no wound, there is no attack". This is is not only incorrect as science has shown that words do in fact hurt, but it supports the idea that you are somehow "allowing" yourself to be hurt by words.
  • Outright refusing to believe a victim can even be a victim in the first place, and therefore must be at fault for their own victimization somehow, or else are lying about their victimization, or else are misinterpreting their victimization for some other form of behavior. (This is a common experience among male rape survivors based on thinking like "A Man Is Always Eager", "men are naturally strong enough to avoid being raped", "boys should be happy they had sex", etc., especially if the rapist is a woman. Another recurring assumption is that only men are lustful enough to perpetrate rape in the first place or that it's impossible for a woman to rape someone. This form of victim blaming also relies on the assumption that all rapists physically overpower their victims rather than using guile, authority, or exploiting teenage hormones or intoxication, which a woman can do just as easily as a man. It also ignores the fact that not all rapists are motivated by a desire for sexual gratification; some are motivated by sadism or a desire to have power over their victim.)
  • Downplaying the abuser's responsibility for their own actions by implying that "they can't help it" because they have a mental illness or disability, or that they were abused themselves. This also carries the Unfortunate Implication that people with mental illnesses and people who were abused in the past are inherently dangerous, which only serves to further reinforce the stigma against survivors and people with mental illnesses, and also implies that since some people with mental disabilities may genuinely be incapable of sufficiently understanding consent, not being "understanding" or trying to hold their caregivers accountable is ableist.
  • Implying that parents whose children ran up credit card bills on an Allegedly Free Game "deserved it" because they didn't use parental controls, limit screen time enough, or even gave their kids a device in the first place. This excuses companies who made the conscious choice to use manipulative tactics (targeting people such as children) for such things, and completely downplays the choice(s) children make (which includes being able to sneak around loopholes).
  • "Boys will be boys". Again, this downplays the conscious choice(s) made by them to commit wronghoods.
  • Telling victims to forgive their abuser and calling them "vindictive", "vengeful" or "unwilling to give people a chance to grow" if they don't. Even if someone changes, they are not entitled to forgiveness or being given a second chance by the people they've hurt, and people can still give someone credit where credit is due for changing, while also wanting nothing to do with them because of their history.
  • Accusing someone who tried to bring injustice(s) to attention and do something about it of "causing trouble".
  • Shaming victims for not publicly outing their abuser ("you knew and did nothing", "you could have stopped so many other people from getting hurt"), when they very likely had a good reason (they had reason to think that they wouldn't be believed or know that their abuser has the public narrative in their favor, they fear a public smear campaign or their abuser or their associates coming after them to harm them, they're still having trouble processing that what happened to them was abuse, etc.)
  • Insinuating civilians of a country are "complicit" in its actions by paying taxes to their government, are citizens of that country, or didn't overthrow their government — and thus it's "okay" for them to be killed by terrorists, suffer the effects of war, deal with sanctions, or to be collateral damage.
  • Applying hindsight to situations. For example, it's now "known" that the RMS Titanic did not have enough lifeboats. The ship was actually within compliance of 1912 — the standard just hadn't been updated yet, and the Titanic accident was one of the reasons the standards were updated. There is a saying that many modern-day safety regulations and security practices were written in blood.

Avoiding Victim Blaming in Your Writing

Let's say you want to entirely avoid writing a character who victim blames, or you want to avoid implying a character deserved their victimization. Here are some things to consider:

  • Many forms of victimization don't "just happen" to people; they have a perpetrator, someone who actively harms someone else. The responsibility lies with the perpetrator, not the victim. Writing characters or situations where someone has invited retribution on themselves may make for good drama, but drawing a connection between someone murdering puppies and then being sexually violated by an unrelated stranger is lazy writing at best and evokes Values Dissonance at worst. We love to see a bad person get punished, but the punishment should come from the consequences of their actions, not whatever misfortune would best pay off their karmic debt. Doing otherwise insinuates both that other victims of similar events must have done something to deserve it, and can create ugly Double Standards; avoiding it keeps the trauma dramatically viable for other characters.
  • Many forms of victimization do "just happen" to people, like natural disasters, diseases, blights, and droughts. In fiction, there's a little more leeway to let these types of things be karma-driven (there's a reason they're sometimes called "Acts of God"), but again, these things need a connection to the victim's actions or attitude to be viable punishment if the reader is expected to think they deserve it. For a very, very broad example, one might argue that the guys who named it the Titanic and proudly assured everyone that nothing on Earth could sink it deserved to be punished for their hubris, but did they really deserve to die a gruesome death for it? And what about the passengers, who only wanted a boat ride?
  • People react differently to stressful situations of all kinds, and different pressures on a person can result in different, sometimes counter-intuitive, actions and ideas. A victim's personality, their level of self-confidence before and after the victimization, the amount of support they have in recovery and the circumstances of the event itself can all have a huge impact on how they cope with it, before, during, and after. While there may be a few observable trends, there is no pre-written script for dealing with loss, pain, suffering, and grief. A victim's reaction, no matter how bizarre, or passive, or self-destructive, is never an indication that they had it coming.
  • Even in cases where there is a definite cause and effect relationship between the action and the tragedy, that still doesn't necessarily justify placing all blame upon the victim and their choices, especially when the tragedy outweighs the momentary poor judgement. Their ability to choose may have been compromised, made for them by another person or by the situation, or it was just random chance. It's often more constructive, in general, to focus on what happened and what can be done for it than why or how, which often don't have satisfying answers. Someone contracting HIV after unsafe consensual sex or drug use is a perfect example: sure, their vices might have overridden their better judgement, but the fact remains that they're now saddled with an incurable virus that they'll have to keep in check for the rest of their lives, which until the early 2000s was a death sentence for the majority of people who came down with it. No amount of shaming is going to cure their HIV.note 
  • The "cause-and-effect" fallacy. Don't confuse cause and effect; not buying a security system or gun won't summon a burglar to break into a house; wearing revealing clothing won't alert rapists to attack. People want to reassure themselves that the victim was responsible for their own misfortune because they want to believe that it won't happen to them. If we define a right and wrong course of action that classifies a break-in or the rape as a reaction to the victim, rather than an action taken by perpetrators (or chance) over which a victim has no control, we maintain the illusion that we're always in control and will never be made a victim.
  • The "failure to prevent" fallacy. A person who fails to sufficiently protect themselves from danger that they know exists is often blamed for their misfortune, because they are seen as having consciously taken a risk by exposing themselves to danger. This ignores any reason beyond outright hubris a person may have for being in such a risky situation (for instance, it doesn't account for being outright unaware of the danger), and places the blame on the victim by directly removing it from the perpetrator. Not only that, but the exact criteria for "optimal protection" widely differs in each person's opinion. For example, the idea that you can prevent your home from being burgled by living in an upscale neighborhood, implicitly believing that victims of urban crime in poor neighborhoods deserve their misfortune for being poor. This ignores that break-ins happen in affluent areas all the time; they already know that the people have money and are possibly out of the house.
  • When attributing a character's problem as "self-inflicted", make sure that it's actually a result of the character's choices and their actions taken. Otherwise, the readers might find someone intended to get their just desserts to be a Woobie who got a raw deal.
  • Some advice towards dealing with Domestic Abuse is for the abused person to try and "fix" their partner. Whether it be because it is a violation of religious principles, a cultural taboo, or simply "admitting defeat", this is still ultimately bad advice. This line of thinking not only discredits the agency the abuser has, but it still ultimately places the "blame" for the abuse on the victim. That evidently, it is up to the abused person to "fix" their abuser and that the abuser is somehow "not in control of their own actions", or is trying to "correct" behaviour.
  • The "universal consent" fallacy. It's the idea that anyone who appears to want to have sex is offering themselves to literally anyone, rather than exercising their right to say yes or no at their discretion. It is an open declaration that a person who wants to have sex is obligated to sexually service anyone who wants them to do so, and saying otherwise is just "being picky" or somehow an insult to whoever they turn down. As you can imagine, this viewpoint is also used to justify rape, claiming that it wouldn't have happened if they were more discreet. Similarly, the idea that a person willing to consent to something with a person is willing to consent to anything with that person. Somebody who is okay with a bit of kissing might very well not be comfortable with going any further.
  • The Double Standard idea that A Man Is Always Eager, and simply by being 1) male and 2) present must mean they want sex, often paired with the "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization. Involuntary physiological reactions are not the same as actually wanting it.
  • Be careful with phrases like "they're just asking for it" and "they brought it on themselves", because no one ever is. Unless someone is deliberately harming or violating the rights of others, they are not doing anything that gives others the right to punish or retaliate against them. Saying things like this holds the victim responsible for the behavior of the perpetrator, and absolves the perpetrator of being responsible for their own behavior. Unless the perpetrator is a very small child, a mindless animal, or otherwise mentally compromised, their inability to behave properly is no one's fault but their own. It also implies that the perpetrator has the right to deliberately harm another person, if that person meets certain criteria.Example 
  • Avoid the misconception regarding scams, deceptive marketing, propaganda, or cults: That they only "work" on people who are weak-minded, gullible, or stupid. The reality is that this can happen to literally anyone. Anyone can be scammed, lied to, manipulated, or recruited into a cult.
  • Acknowledge why a victim of Domestic Abuse or familial abuse will stay in an abusive household. Running away will often result in homelessness, meaning that they will have a new set of problems. Even if they end up "saving money", they can often end up losing it.
  • Acknowledge just how difficult it is to just up and move. Similar to the above example, packing one's bags and moving to another city may result in homelessness, while moving to another country means you have little to no social support. Real-world refugees often end up on waiting lists for years and years even if they qualify, while countries do not make it easy to immigrate even if they are there legally. Even if it's a fictional world where the process is easier, take into account what challenge(s) people have and account this into worldbuilding.
  • Acknowledge that the people in countries are not always united — even in times of war.
  • Acknowledge that products can be made with defects that "do" slip past testing. If someone buys a product that turns out to be defective, it's not the person's fault, it can even be just dumb luck. Maybe it happened in transit. Maybe it wasn't design but manufacturing.
  • Keep one thing in mind: Irony. It's easy to blame someone for trusting an Obvious Judas, but as far as the characters know? This Is Reality. And in reality? People can only act off of information that they themselves already know. If a villain sings about how evil they are and how much they want to ruin the protagonist's life? That's information for the audience to know — not for the character to act off of.
  • As a final note, remember that in fiction, these can be flexible when the right arrangement of narrative devices are in place; your volcano god may well be known to punish those who don't eat their vegetables with lightning bolts, your villain may have a legion of creepy baby-eaters to send out into the world to eat the children of smokers. The tone your work takes, and how it characterizes the events and the people involved, makes all the difference.

Alternative Title(s): Blaming The Victim

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