Victim Blaming

Navigating through a traumatic event, such as a sexual assault or rape can be difficult enough without the added burden of victim blaming. Victim blaming is any behavior, attitude or perspective that places blame for abuse on the victim. It can take the form of asking victims questions about what they did or didn’t do to invite a crime or pointing out perceived weaknesses in a victim that could have made them more of a target. It can also be in the form of excuses for the abuser, such as “He was drunk, he didn’t know what he was doing” or “She’s off her meds.”

Research shows that victim blaming is a universal problem and it doesn’t discriminate between gender, crime types, ages or communities. It can even occur within the same family. The most important thing to remember is that victim blaming does not help anyone. Rather, it silences victims by making them feel ashamed of their experience. Victim blaming also makes people less likely to seek the support they need to recover from an assault or a traumatic incident and more likely to not report it to authorities. By doing so, they continue the cycle of violence.

Despite the fact that victim blaming is a widespread problem, it is not well understood and many researchers are still struggling to identify its causes. Some factors that have been identified include individual versus binding values, the degree to which participants identify with a victim and attitudes toward traditional role models as well as adherence to rape myths. However, these factors are often considered in isolation and they have not been combined in one model to provide explanatory approaches.

In the current study, we aimed to investigate these issues in more detail. We included all of these influencing factors into a model and also investigated the effect of the valence of the ending of a story on victim blaming. We found that the severity of a victim’s consequences at the end of the story was an important predictor for victim blaming. Similarly, the degree to which participants identified with a victim and their attitudes toward traditional role models were significant predictors of victim blaming.

Finally, we conducted mediation analyses for both male and female victims with the assumption that a victim’s gender would influence their response to victim blaming in a similar manner. The results from the mediation analyses showed that, holding other predictors constant, subjects who met gender stereotypes of a victim were more likely to blame them than subjects who did not meet these stereotypes, particularly when the victim had high levels of stereotyping and threat at the end of the story. Moreover, the interaction between subject gender and victim stereotyping was significantly higher for female victims than male victims given the high value of threat. This indicates that there is a need for more investigation of the interaction between gender and victim blaming in order to understand the phenomenon in more depth.