Victim Blaming

Victim blaming is a social phenomenon where individuals or groups hold victims responsible for the harm or misfortune they experience, often ignoring the broader contexts that contribute to their situations. This behavior can manifest in various scenarios, including poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and instances of sexual or physical assault. Victim blaming is rooted in attribution theory, which suggests that people tend to attribute their successes to external factors while blaming others for their failures. This mindset can lead to negative emotional repercussions for victims, including feelings of shame, guilt, and outrage.

The implications of victim blaming extend into social policies and public perceptions, particularly regarding welfare recipients and victims of violence. For instance, stereotypes about lazy or irresponsible individuals can perpetuate a lack of empathy for those in poverty. Social biases can also affect how victims of sexual violence are treated, often scrutinizing their character or behavior instead of holding perpetrators accountable. This sensitivity around victim blaming highlights the importance of understanding the environmental and societal factors that contribute to an individual's circumstances, fostering a more compassionate and informed approach to such complex issues.

Published in: 2021

By: Purdy, Elizabeth R., PhD

Subject Terms

Victim Blaming

Abstract

Victim blaming occurs when individuals or groups blame other individuals or groups for succumbing or being subjected to damaging or demeaning circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, homelessness, rape or sexual/physical assault, and certain health conditions such as addiction and HIV/AIDS. Scholars who study victim blaming have identified the tendency of individuals to credit the success of others to external factors and their failures to internal factors. Victim blaming may lead to feelings of shame, failure, regret, guilt, anger, disgust, outrage, and loss in the blamed. Victim blaming is also implicated in policymaking.

Overview

In The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958), Australian American psychologist Fritz Heider, the father of attribution theory, maintained that humans have an innate need to attempt to explain the actions of others in case they ever find themselves in the same or similar circumstances. A type of attribution theory, victim blaming suggests that individuals should be blamed for their own circumstances and allows blamers to ignore environmental reasons for social conditions and crimes. In the early 1970s, a group of scholars led by Bernard Weiner developed a three-dimensional theory of attribution that begins with the process of observation of behavior, a determination of the cause of the behavior, and attribution of the cause to a particular factor. The dimensions involve determining whether the behavior was caused by internal or external factors, understanding whether causes changed or remained stable over time, and the attributing of behaviors to luck, individual action, or the actions of others. William Ryan (2010) maintains that the epitome of victim blaming is suggested by a classic Zero Mostel sketch in which Mostel plays a southern senator investigating the causes of World War II. The sketch ends with the question of what Pearl Harbor was doing in the Pacific in the first place.

The poor are often perceived by unsympathetic observers as lazy and unwilling to work. In the United States in 2017, 5.7 percent, or 18.5 million people, had incomes less than half the poverty line of $12,430 a year for a family of four. Another 12.3 percent, or 39.7 million people, lived below the poverty line of $24,860 for a family of four. Almost 13 million children lived in poverty, and children made up 17.5 percent of Americans living below the poverty line. More than 22 million women (13.6 percent) lived in poverty. More than one in five African Americans and almost one in five Hispanics lived in poverty. Approximately one in four disabled Americans aged eighteen to sixty-five and more than one in four Native Americans lived in poverty. Less than 9 percent of whites lived in poverty.

Even poor children who have no control over family incomes may be blamed for their status. They may be ridiculed for not having enough to eat, for wearing castoffs or ill-fitting clothes, for not knowing proper grammar, and for being poor readers, even though reading difficulty may be caused by a lack of access to books outside the classroom, parents having poor literacy skills, or having parents who do not speak English. Poor children are also disadvantaged by school systems with inadequate school budgets, teachers with a lack of training, outdated or unrepresentative curricula, and administrators who fail to understand the needs of the communities they serve. The situation may be particularly bad when children live in single-parent homes with mothers who work at low-wage jobs and/or draw welfare.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan launched a campaign to discredit welfare through the stereotype of the “welfare queen” who drove a Cadillac and lived a lavish lifestyle while drawing welfare checks. Under Bill Clinton, the United States initiated major welfare reforms in 1996 with passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Though signed into law by a Democratic president, the act was a top priority for Republicans. At that time, 29 million Americans were considered poor. The 3.5 million families drawing welfare were predominately single mothers with small children. Government data indicated that the average term on welfare was 23 months—less than two years. Public perception, however, held that people on welfare were by and large African American women motivated by free money to have out-of-wedlock babies rather than marry or join the workforce, a multigenerational and life-long scheme alternately presented as either an irresistible trap or a fraud on hardworking taxpayers. The act tightened eligibility requirements, including a requirement that recipients find employment in order to receive benefits. This component was seen as critical to instilling a work ethic in a degenerate population of single mothers. In an interesting demonstration of attribution theory, one study, conducted in 1998 by Karen Seccombe, James Delores, and Kimberly Battle Waters, found that the interviewed welfare recipients described other recipients as “lazy” and “unmotivated” but in explaining their own plight blamed the social structure, the welfare system, or fate.

Homelessness is a major problem all over the world, and it is not limited to developing countries. Of the fifteen cities with the largest number of homeless people, six are found in the United States: New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Phoenix. The other cities with the largest homeless populations are Manilla, Moscow, Mexico City, Jakarta, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Sao Paulo, and Athens. Homeless people are consistently blamed for their own situations. They may be labeled “lazy,” “dangerous,” and even “criminal.” Studies of the homeless show that people become homeless mostly because they lose their jobs, work in low-paying jobs that do not enable them to afford housing, have chronic illnesses, lose access to public benefits, or experience family breakdowns.

One in three homeless people is without a home as the result of mental illness or addictions to alcohol or drugs. In the United States, views on homelessness often divide along party lines, but Belcher and Deforge (2012) contend that it is in the interests of politicians to blame the homeless for their own plight; that is, if homelessness is a personal problem it is not incumbent on government to provide assistance, especially if a person’s predicament is due to vices and other character defects.

In the 1990s, a number of scholars who study victim blaming turned their attention to the practice of blaming HIV/AIDS victims for their own illness, discovering a strong link between victim blaming and prejudice. Research indicated that age and educational level were correlated to prejudicial victim blaming. Older people were significantly more likely than young people to blame victims, as were the less educated. Both groups were also more supportive than others of severely restricting the rights and mobility of HIV/AIDS victims. Those who were tolerant toward alternative lifestyles were more likely to blame other factors, such as the disease itself, than the sick.

Further Insights

Throughout history, victims of prejudice, violence, and social exclusion have been blamed for their plights by those who control power structures. Although they make up roughly half of the world’s population, entrenchment of patriarchal systems has led to women being treated as what Simone de Beauvoir identifies as the “other” in The Second Sex, first published in 1949. Thus, women have continued to be blamed when they become victims of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. This is particularly true of rape victims, who often blame themselves, either by convincing themselves that they should not have been at a particular location where the rape happened or by excusing males from responsibility by insisting that they, as victims, were poor judges of character and should have known the perpetrator was capable of such behavior (Sheikh & McNamara, 2014). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 12.3 percent of all American women have been forcibly sexually penetrated at some point in their lives. Since the 1990s, data indicate that incidences of rape/sexual assault have continued to rise. However, between 1971 and 2006, the number of perpetrators actually charged fell to 50 percent. In the early twenty-first century, political conservatives often argued that the statistically supported “rape epidemic” was a liberal attempt to undermine the status of white males, claiming that half of all reported rapes were based on false claims.

Studies show that college students are more vulnerable to rape/sexual assault than any other group because of the prevalence of partying, drinking, and drugs. Studies also show that in 80 percent of all rapes/sexual assault cases reported, the victim and the perpetrator know one another, at least casually. In a 1987 study that is considered controversial, Mary Koss reported that 27.5 percent of the 3,862 students studied had been victims of rape or attempted rape since the age of fourteen. A difference of opinion exists, however, in what constitutes sexual assault. A woman who is drinking or taking drugs, for example, is commonly viewed as putting herself in a position to be “taken advantage of” and is therefore personally accountable for crimes committed against her. The view that vast numbers of rape charges are false rely on this logic, discounting sexual violence by men as normal male behavior courted or at least enabled by their victims.

Victims of acquaintance rape/sexual assault are often accused of outright lying, leading their attackers on, or signaling willingness by being sexually “promiscuous.” Studies on victim blaming indicate that victim blaming of rape/sexual assault victims is more common when the parties are known to one another. While the character of the attacker(s) remains relatively unimportant, the character of the victim is subject to intense scrutiny and central to the light in which the offense is viewed. In 2007, nineteen-year-old Cassandra Hernandez was gang raped at a party. After reporting the case, she decided not to press charges on the advice of the Air Force legal office. Instead, she was charged with underage drinking and indecent acts, and her attackers were granted immunity for testifying against her. Sheikh and McNamara (2014), in a study of college students reacting to differing accounts of a fictional rape from the female and male perspective, found that the victim was most frequently blamed when portrayed as a married woman with children having an affair, because respondents believed she “deserved” to be raped.

Audrey Miller, Amanda Amacker, and Antoinette King (2011) found that victim blaming of sexual assault victims is influenced by a number of factors: gender, with males more likely than females to blame the victim; similarity to victims, with those who see themselves as potential victims less inclined to victim blaming; empathy for victims, which is dependent on such factors as knowing the victim or hearing her side of the story; and rape myth acceptance, which is based on the notion that a women cannot be raped against her will. The rape myth is the belief that all women secretly harbor a desire to be raped, as perpetuated by popular fiction and film (as in the famous scene from Gone with the Wind in which the drunk and angry protagonist rapes his wife, who is notably cheerful the following morning). The victim blaming of rape victims is further perpetuated by the purity myth, which suggests that women who are sexually active cannot be raped. The myth also leads to misperceptions. During his 2012 campaign for the Senate, Republican Todd Akin of Michigan, publicly asserted his own preposterous belief that if a woman was raped, her body would “naturally” block a possible pregnancy.

Miller, Amacker, and King conducted a study of 69 female undergraduates in a general psychology class at a southwestern university. Along with a number of other scholars, they found that victims of past assaults were just as likely as others to blame the victim. Scholars hypothesize that women, even those who have been raped or assaulted themselves, do not identify with other rape/sexual assault victims because of the defensive attribution hypothesis, which posits that females blame assault victims out of the need to convince themselves that if they do not behave, dress, or put themselves in situations similar to the victim, they will not be raped/sexually assaulted (Ferräo & Gonçalves, 2015). Another victim blaming theory is that in a just world, crimes or drastic situations only happen to those who deserve them.

Discourse

Violence against women is considered a significant social problem in virtually every country in the world, and many developing countries either have no laws against it or they do not enforce existing laws because of the widespread notion that females are property. Violence against women in some developing countries is common, though becoming less accepted. Victims of sexual violence who have low self-esteem tend blame themselves. Culturally, they receive frequent messaging that they deserved to be attacked. While both males and females may engage in violent behaviors such as slapping, shoving, and throwing objects at another, most crimes that involve beatings and murder are perpetrated by males. According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, from 30 to 55 percent of all emergency room visits made by females are the result of domestic violence. Numerous scholars have examined the impact of “hostile sexism” and “benevolent sexism” on victim blaming of females, finding that both types of sexism may lead to victim blaming. Women in relationships with abusers are often blamed for not leaving their attackers despite the fact that studies of domestic violence reveal that 75 percent of deaths occur when women attempt to leave. Studies also show that 73 percent of attackers were abused as children.

Victims of assault become vulnerable to a variety of conditions, and victims may suffer from fear, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, self-blame, and social adjustment problems. Victims of rape/sexual assault may become vulnerable to sexual dysfunction, and they face a higher than normal risk of being assaulted again. In most cases, victims of sexual assault and rape are protected by local shield laws that ban newspapers from identifying them, but the prevalence of social media has led to campaigns of harassment against victims. When identities of victims of sexual assaults and rapes become public knowledge, victims may face public humiliation and threats to their lives and property. In 2007, when the names of women accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of rape became public, their lives were threatened. Likewise, after hearings on the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in which he was accused of the attempted rape of a high school acquaintance, his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, was unable to return to her home because of death threats. During the swearing-in ceremony on October 9, 2018, President Donald Trump, himself on record discussing his own privileged practice of sexually assaulting women, apologized to Kavanaugh for attacks on his character and dismissed charges as a “Democratic hoax.”

Terms & Concepts

Attribution Theory: A social psychological term used to explain the tendency of individuals to explain human behavior by attributing specific causes to actions.

Benevolent Sexism: A form of ambivalent sexism involving perceptions that create a stereotype of women as biologically both moral and weak. This manifests as “putting women on pedestals” or believing that women require male protection. Although males who hold such attitudes do not consider themselves prejudiced, benevolent sexism promotes the idea that women who shirk their natural roles voluntarily become prey to men, who are biologically less moral and therefore less responsible where breakdowns in the moral order occur.

Hostile Sexism: Like benevolent sexism, a form of ambivalent sexism; first identified in 1996 by Peter Glick and Susan Fiske, hostile sexism arises from negative opinions of women that lead to anger or resentment directed at all women as a group. Hostile sexism manifests in such irrational beliefs as the rape myth and assertions that women are incompetent and do not belong in fields considered male preserves, such as scientific and mathematical fields of study, online gaming, and science fiction writing.

Patriarchy: Refers to the social system in which males hold legal and social power over females. Patriarchy has historically involved women being treated as property and having only limited rights. Patriarchal practices such as coverture, in which married women were legally covered by their husband, and primogeniture, which established lines of inheritance in which only a first-born male inherited a family’s wealth supported a system founded on male authority, the lines of which are still strongly present in power structures from the family to the highest levels of government.

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996): Welfare reform act that provided states with greater control over access to welfare and gave them a good deal of leeway in establishing welfare policies and programs. The act also replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

Post-traumatic stress disorder: A lasting psychological reaction to a traumatic event such as combat, rape, or natural disaster. Victims may experience physical symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, headaches, and trouble sleeping. Psychological symptoms may include mood changes, flashbacks, hallucinations, nightmares, social avoidance, and trouble concentrating. The disorder may be accompanied by the feeling that individual behavior could have prevented the attack/event, or survivor’s guilt.

Purity Myth: The belief that only a virgin can be raped because sexually active women have opened themselves up to male advances. The term was coined by Jessica Valenti in 2009 in The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women.

Bibliography

Belcher, J. R., & Deforge, B. R. (2012). Social stigma and homelessness: The limits of social change. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 22(8), 929–946. Retrieved September 22, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=83182582&site=ehost-live

Berke, D. S., & Zeichner, A. (2016). Testing a dual process model of gender-based violence: A laboratory examination. Violence and Victims, 31(2), 200–214. Retrieved September 22, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=114246808&site=ehost-live

Brown, A. L., Horton, J., & Guillory, A. (2018). The impact of victim alcohol consumption and perpetrator use of force on perceptions in an acquaintance rape vignette. Violence & Victims, 33(1), 40–52. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=128779848&site=ehost-live

Ferräo, M. C., & Gonçalves, G. (2015). Rape crimes reviewed: The role of observer variables in female victim-blaming. Psychological Thought, 8(1), 47–67.

Johnson, L. M., Mullick, R., & Mulford, C. I. (2002). General versus specific victim blaming. Journal of Social Psychology, 142(2), 249–263.

Joseph, R. (2018). The welfare/self-sufficiency gap among single mothers through theoretical lenses. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 28(6), 731–745. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=132459911&site=ehost-live

Miller, A., Amacker, A., & King, A. (2011). Sexual victimization history and perceived similarity to a sexual assault victim: A path model of perceiver variables predicting victim culpability attributions. Sex Roles, 64(5–6), 372–381. Retrieved September 22, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=58508550&site=ehost-live

Riley, G. A., & Baah-Odoom, D. (2010). Do stigma, blame and stereotyping contribute to unsafe sexual behaviour? A test of claims about the spread of HIV/AIDS arising from social representation theory and the AIDS risk reduction model. Social Science & Medicine, 71(3), 600–607. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=51864456&site=ehost-live

Ryan W. (2010). Blaming the victim. (Rev. ed.) New York: Vintage Books.

Sheikh, S., & McNamara, M. E. (2014). Insights from self-blame and victim blaming. Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 241–244.

Victim Blaming

On this Page

Subject Terms

Victim Blaming

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Discourse

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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