What is Victim Blaming?

Victim blaming is a common, but damaging, phenomenon that occurs when people blame victims for negative events or outcomes they did not cause. This happens when a person makes a false association between an outcome and the victim, such as “They must have brought it on themselves,” or “If they didn’t act so carelessly, they wouldn’t be in this situation.” This can have devastating effects on victims who are left to deal with their own feelings of guilt and shame after being wrongly assigned responsibility for a harmful event. It can also make them less likely to seek help and report incidents of abuse to authorities.

In many cases, victim blaming is unintentional and stems from a lack of empathy for others or a belief that other people’s experiences are not valid. People who are more critical of other people and often dislike coping with emotional situations are more likely to victim blame, as they are not considering another person’s perspective when interpreting a situation.

Other times, victim blaming may be a defense mechanism to help people feel better about themselves. This is especially true for individuals who are struggling with incompetence, as they will try to rationalize their poor performance by assigning fault to the victim rather than to the incompetent environment they are in (Weber and Camerer Citation 2003). It can also happen when someone has a skewed worldview, such as believing that men are better than women at certain tasks.

A person’s social and cultural background can also influence their victim-blaming tendencies. For example, people who share a culture with the perpetrator of a harmful event are more likely to blame that individual, as they are trying to maintain their own sense of morality by thinking of an excuse for why their co-worker might be incompetent rather than the more complicated and nuanced reasons behind the woman’s struggle (Morrison, Levine, and Snider Citation 2008).

Some people may also blame victims because they believe it is an appropriate way to cope with uncomfortable feelings. This can be the case for people who are being abused by their partners or when family members are dealing with the betrayal of an abusive relative. They will attempt to rationalize the abuse by arguing that their loved one could have prevented the incident if they had done more to prevent it from happening in the first place, such as making themselves more available or having an affair of their own (Boyle and Walker Citation 2016).

The bottom line is that victim blaming hurts everyone involved, including perpetrators. It causes victims to feel isolated and demoralized after a traumatic experience, which delays their healing process. It can also make them less likely to report incidents of abuse to police or seek support, which in turn allows perpetrators to continue their harmful actions. This is why it’s so important to stop victim blaming, whether we are talking about an experience in our own lives or attempting to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes.