Did you have trouble? Many will surely sympathize with you. But there will certainly be those who will add that nothing would have happened if you were at home in the evenings. The attitude towards rape victims is even more critical. Mini? Makeup? Obviously — «provoked». Why do some tend to blame the crime on the victim?
Why do some of us tend to judge those in trouble, and how can we change that?
It’s all about a special set of moral values. The more important fidelity, obedience and chastity are for us, the sooner we will consider that the victim herself is to blame for her troubles. In opposition to them are concern for the neighbor and justice — the supporters of these values are more liberal in their views.
Harvard University psychologists (USA) Laura Niemi and Liane Young1 offered their own classification of basic values:
individualizing, that is, based on the principle of justice and concern for the individual;
binders, that is, reflecting the cohesion of a particular group or clan.
These values do not exclude each other and are combined in us in different proportions. However, which of them we prefer can tell a lot about us. For example, the more we identify ourselves with «individualizing» values, the more likely we will be supporters of progressive tendencies in politics. Whereas «binding» values are more popular with conservatives.
The more important fidelity, obedience and chastity are for us, the sooner we will consider that the victim herself is to blame for her troubles.
Adherents of «individualizing» values usually consider the «victim and perpetrator» option: the victim suffered, the perpetrator harmed her. Defenders of «fastening» values, first of all, pay attention to the precedent itself — how «immoral» it is and blames the victim. And even if the victim is not obvious, as in the case of the act of burning the flag, this group of people is more characterized by the desire for immediate revenge and reprisals. A striking example is honor killings, which are still practiced in some Indian states.
Initially, Laura Niemi and Liana Young were offered brief descriptions of the victims of various crimes. — raped, molested, stabbed and strangled. And they asked the participants in the experiment to what extent they considered the victims «injured» or «guilty.»
Predictably, virtually all participants in the studies were more likely to view victims of sexual crimes as guilty. But, to the surprise of the scientists themselves, people with strong «binding» values tended to believe that in general all victims were guilty — regardless of the crime that was committed against them.. In addition, the more the participants in this study believed the victim was guilty, the less they saw her as a victim.
Focusing on the perpetrator, paradoxically, reduces the need to blame the victim.
In another study, respondents were given descriptions of specific cases of rape and robbery. They were faced with the task of assessing the extent to which the victim and the perpetrator are responsible for the outcome of the crime and to what extent the actions of each of them individually can affect it. If people believed in “binding” values, they more often believed that it was the victim who determined how the situation would unfold. The «individualists» held opposing views.
But are there ways to change the perception of perpetrators and victims? In their latest study, psychologists tested how shifting the focus from the victim to the perpetrator in the wording of crime descriptions can affect its moral assessment.
Sentences describing instances of sexual abuse used either the victim (“Lisa was raped by Dan”) or the perpetrator (“Dan raped Lisa”) as the subject. Proponents of «binding» values blamed the victims. At the same time, the emphasis on the suffering of the unfortunate only contributed to her condemnation. But the special attention to the criminal, paradoxically, reduced the need to blame the victim.
The desire to place blame on the victim is rooted in our core values. Fortunately, it is amenable to correction due to changes in the same legal wording. Shifting the focus from the victim (“Oh, poor thing, what did she go through …”) to the perpetrator (“Who gave him the right to force a woman to have sex?”) Can seriously help justice, summarize Laura Niemi and Liane Yang.
1 L. Niemi, L. Young. «When and Why We See Victims as Responsible The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims», Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 2016.