Punishing the victim?

Punishing the victim is a good way to avoid taking responsibility or addressing a problem, I guess.

For example, if kids are being bullied, why not just find out why and attempt to do something about it? In my high school, we had hall monitor-type people roaming hallways and the commons area. They weren’t like overbearing thought police, and they were nice. They were there to just make sure nothing got out of hand.

I think it is a defense mechanism to prevent yourself from having any responsibility or empathy with the victim. It frees up the mind to dismiss the situation.

Very common, quite despicable.

It absolves the creepy, the weird, the worthless, the stupid, the hopeless, the violent, and every other form of uselessness from having to face up to their ugliness.
They are, after all, a political constituency.

If we assume the victim did nothing wrong, that implies that this could happen to anyone at any time even if they don’t make any bad decisions. It is much easier for people to believe the victim fucked up than to accept that.

I’ll just parrot @augustlan , despicable them!

It is despicable for people to blame the victim for what has happened. Early last year in Cleveland, TX, a 10 year old girl was gang raped by a group of 8 young men who were in the end of their teen years. The headlines blamed the girl & the girl’s family, for not controlling her ‘better’. I read several articles that said what a shame it was that the young men were going to have to ‘remember’ this for the rest of their lives & were going to be prevented from continuing to participate in football. I do not know what ultimately happened to the rapists (it may not have gone to trial yet), but the little girl & her family had to move out of Cleveland, so she could continue to go to school.

This is because as a society we still champion aggressiveness, cockiness, manipulation, facades and other forms of negative behaviors. We see this everywhere including in magazines, books, self-help articles on the internet, dating advice, etc. Why? I’m not sure but maybe we tend to get bored easily, maybe because of those who profit off of negative behaviors and their influences (probably fueled by the latter), maybe because of conformism/traditions, I don’t know.

Instead of focusing on trying to formulate a more enlightened society where we would treat others with respect and show empathy for others we instead have a large segment of society that does not want this type of change, so instead we like to blame the victims for ‘allowing’ themselves to become victims or doing something to deserve negative treatment from others. Until we start attempting to change the general mindset towards focusing on the underlying causes to our problems instead of teaching people just to accept things as they are and adjust we will not move forward in a positive way as a society.

I love it when people blame the victim. Lets me know who the next criminal will be.

When she was in 6th grade (that’s SIXTH FUCKING GRADE), my daughter went through an attempted rape while walking home from school. 5 boys from her class were the shits involved. They broke into a friends house, where she had tried to get away from them. It was very ugly.
The principal said it was my daughters fault, since she dressed provocatively.
I should have broken his fucking nose.

@filmfann Send me a name and an address and I’ll do it for you.

I think @Mariah hit the nail on the head. People don’t want to consider that random bad things could happen to them. It’s so much easier to think that the victim did something wrong. So if “I never do anything wrong then it won’t happen to me”.

I’ve been on the receiving end of that mentality and it stopped me from accessing help I desperately needed.