I Love Me Some Victim Blaming

Ok, yes, so I know it’s been forever since I’ve made a post. I don’t like to linger on details, though, so in the words of Monty Python, I’ll “get on with it”.

I was stumbling around the Internet earlier when I came across this piece from the website Psychology Today called “How Psychopaths Choose Their Victims”. I didn’t really go in to the article with many expectations, to be honest, but what I certainly wasn’t prepared for was to come away from the piece having learned that women specifically make themselves vulnerable to male psychopaths.

Who knew?

I have a few problems with this. Primarily that the article chose to make all of the possible victims in the study females (or at least if they weren’t all female, the article doesn’t make that clear), which is troubling, as it seems to indicate that men cannot be victims of violent crime. As if this weren’t enough, the psychopaths used in this experiment were all men, to the reader’s knowledge. Already the situation is rife with a negative gender dichotomy, that of the shadowy man lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce on a woman walking home alone at night. This paints a very unrealistic picture as to how abuse happens to women overall, while also setting up the popular notion that men are always the abusers and women are always the abused – a false reality which hurts men and women alike.

Then we have this little gem (emphasis my own):

The rather depressing upshot of all this is that, as much we may hate the idea of “blaming the victim,” people who are on the receiving end of crime often do mark themselves out, if only subliminally. I suppose that we could look on the bright side and recognize that there are things we can do to make us less vulnerable. But unfortunately there always going to weaker and more vulnerable members of society — the lambs on whom the wolves will focus their attention.

So…these “weaker and more vulnerable members of society” should just accept their fate as some violent stalker’s play thing?

The article says that the traits which made the women stick out as being vulnerable included actions which are “socially submissive… lack of eye contact, fidgeting of the hands and feet, and the avoidance of large gestures when shifting posture”. These sound like social cues, to me, that we pick up as we grow, when boys are encouraged to dominate space, and girls are encouraged not to; getting into that would require a separate post, but my main point is that these socially dictated norms are what seem to be being turned around on these women by society in the form of victim blaming. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

What really irks me more than anything, though, is the sheer cop out on behalf of the author Jeff Wise (pun most certainly intended), who acknowledges the rampant issue of victim blaming, then falls for the excuse anyway. If you’re going to shun something, shun it entirely or not at all.

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