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A Gosh Danged Separate Thread About Victim Blaming
surfpossum
A nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
A nonentitytrying to preserve the anonymity he so richly deserves.Registered User regular
What is victim blaming? I don't know! Wikipedia says:
But what does it mean?
Does being held responsible refer solely to the wrongful act? Can we separate responsibility from the wrongful act from responsibility for an elevated risk of that wrongful act? Is there some line wherein it does or does not become appropriate to chastise someone for actions that are not, themselves, "wrongful?"
If I choose to put myself in harm's way, how much responsibility do I have if I am harmed by a wrongful act versus just an act? Is going outside and getting punched in the head by a stranger for no reason the same level of responsibility as going outside during a hurricane? How about an airstrike?
Is it the difference between is and ought? It is dangerous to do a thing versus you ought not to do a thing?
Is it the difference in timing? You shouldn't do a thing versus you shouldn't have done a thing?
Is it dependent on context or independent of it? Is it worse when we don't spend an appropriate amount of time or energy condemning the actual wrongful act, or is it always bad?
I realize these are a lot of questions but my mind isn't really made up on the issue myself. I've noticed myself leaning more one way or another depending on what the latest reasonable sounding post on the issue was. Personally, right now, I'd encourage my hypothetical future children to not engage in risky activities and explain why. If they did anyway, and something bad happened, I definitely would NOT tell them that they shouldn't have done it. What I might do, eventually, is reiterate my plea for them to not engage in said risky activities.
On that note, I will encourage you all to talk about this here instead of the policing thread, and because moderation is not a wrongful act if the policing thread gets locked I will tell you that you shouldn't have done it (I probably won't).
Does that sound accurate? I think it sounds agreeable.Wikipedia wrote:Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially responsible for the harm that befell them.
But what does it mean?
Does being held responsible refer solely to the wrongful act? Can we separate responsibility from the wrongful act from responsibility for an elevated risk of that wrongful act? Is there some line wherein it does or does not become appropriate to chastise someone for actions that are not, themselves, "wrongful?"
If I choose to put myself in harm's way, how much responsibility do I have if I am harmed by a wrongful act versus just an act? Is going outside and getting punched in the head by a stranger for no reason the same level of responsibility as going outside during a hurricane? How about an airstrike?
Is it the difference between is and ought? It is dangerous to do a thing versus you ought not to do a thing?
Is it the difference in timing? You shouldn't do a thing versus you shouldn't have done a thing?
Is it dependent on context or independent of it? Is it worse when we don't spend an appropriate amount of time or energy condemning the actual wrongful act, or is it always bad?
I realize these are a lot of questions but my mind isn't really made up on the issue myself. I've noticed myself leaning more one way or another depending on what the latest reasonable sounding post on the issue was. Personally, right now, I'd encourage my hypothetical future children to not engage in risky activities and explain why. If they did anyway, and something bad happened, I definitely would NOT tell them that they shouldn't have done it. What I might do, eventually, is reiterate my plea for them to not engage in said risky activities.
On that note, I will encourage you all to talk about this here instead of the policing thread, and because moderation is not a wrongful act if the policing thread gets locked I will tell you that you shouldn't have done it (I probably won't).
+7
This discussion has been closed.
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@Elvenshae the problem that I have with assuming it's a "dumb move" is you have no idea why it happened. Maybe the guy's wife left him and he's feeling suicidal. Maybe he's got a significant mental illness. Judging a 'dumb move' shouldn't be part of the equation for anyone who just went through a traumatic experience. Start with empathy, sympathy, and support, and then move to look for a cause. Reserve judgement for much later, if it's even necessary.
Clearly the problem was my absent-mindedness and not the fact that someone decided to smash my window and rummage through the compartments for loose change. No sir.
Context is at the heart of it.
I'm very interested in exploring why this happens so much -- is it just because people want to believe that bad things won't happen to them unless they do bad/stupid things first? That anything bad that happens to a good person must be because they did something to bring it on themselves?
Back in 2010 we left our backpacks in our vehicle and sure enough some piece of shit broke the window and stole the lot of it.
Things we could have done, not parked in a parkade just off of Granville in Vancouver is one. Second we could have just took our backpacks with us. Should also have been more aware of the surroundings, we were gone for a very short period of time which led us to believe that someone was in the parkade keeping an eye on comings and goings.
Luckily it was just material goods lost and a broken window (a small one too so that was nice of them
Situational awareness and making yourself less of a target IMO are good things. There is plenty of things you can do to make yourself more of an attractive target, lot of it is unconscious behaviors that unless you know you are doing them you won't be aware to make changes.
You can not live your life under the assumption that every person you meet might be some sort of criminal out to harm you.
So it's never ok to blame the victim of a crime.
In the example of leaked selfies or selfies made public, the victim trusted the other person(if we are not talking about a hack) and absolutely did not expect them to act that way. And no nonshitty person would go on and then make these pics public. Unfortunately the shitty person quota seems to be a lot higher among teenage boys. Or men in general.
Could have been more careful? Sure. You can always be more careful to the point where you leave the house in full body armor and carry a taser and a panic button at all times.
But still it would not be ok to say that you brought this on yourself, as you did not put out any invites for people to smash your car window and steal your stuff.
Having a backpack in your car makes a break-in more likely if someone passing by the car can see the backpack.
It doesn't matter what is in it, they don't know. But it might be a laptop or something like that. If they are looking to steal shit from a car (vice stealing the actual car) they are not going to break into a car that looks empty/clean inside, they will break into the one with the backpack.
Whether you consider it an acceptable risk or not is up to you. If you feel like pointing out this very basic fact is "victim blaming" that's perfectly fine too.
It doesn't make it any less true. Stuff your backpack under a seat or in the trunk or take it with you or eat the additional risk of leaving it visible.
I think it also depends a lot on the social view of the thing that happened. Like, currently, we all pretty much agree that stealing is wrong and it's not the victim's fault, like, morally speaking. So I think we're mostly okay with giving people advice on how to prevent their stuff being stolen because they obviously bear no moral responsibility for the actual theft.
However, we as a society have some pretty messed up views regarding the moral burden of, say, sexual assault. Many people DO assign the victim moral responsibility for the actual act itself.
I feel like there's some kind of very fine distinction at play, similar to the idea of fault vs. responsibility with respect to privilege, but I can't quite pin it down. That may be because I'm mistaken, tho.
There is a big gap between reasonable levels of maintaining awareness around you and full on freak out body armor armed and dangerous at all times nut bar preparedness. Walking and texting is a good example of a reasonable thing that you probably shouldn't do or at least be more aware of when you are doing it.
And they caused hundreds of dollars of damage my forcing the passenger side door lock with a screwdriver.
So there is risk-reduction but there really is no risk-free, criminals are COMPLETE ASSHOLES no one is defending them when they say things like "don't leave a backpack in your car."
These are also the kinds of petty crimes that virtually never get solved, are almost never prevented from happening, and the stolen stuff is never recovered, and as such the police are doing a sort of minimal service by informing you of risk-reduction strategies.
Because of the pettiness and unsolvability of the car break in type crime, I also find this thing to be very unlike the "telling rape victims not to dress slutty or walk anywhere by themselves" thing. Those crime scenarios are really not analogous.
And are you sure that he was blaming you? Or was he merely informing you of the risk and gave advice to help you avoid a similar accident in the future?
Although when you work as a professional you sometimes become very tired of the basic mistakes people do when they're not as risk aware. When I was working as a shift supervisor at a Student restaurant I can't remember the amount of time I had to tell people that if they're going to cut a baguette they should never ever ever cut the baguette while holding it in their hands and with the knife towards the palm, because when you're cutting 50 baguettes a day you will eventually put that knife into your palm. It's not an if, it's a when.
Mostly though it's the world we live in.
Because honestly that cop couldn't do shit about your satchel theft. It's gone, and it's virtually untracable and the crime will never be solved because there were no identifying markers and there were no witnesses or fingerprints (because if you're smashing carwindows you wear gloves). The only thing he could do was to try to cut down on risk-prone behavior.
The same reason why we're told to look both ways when crossing a road or to not accept candy from strangers. Because with a sufficient number of individuals in a population morally reprehensible behavior becomes like a natural accident, like a lavine or rockslide. All it takes is for one person to engage in that sort of behavior and it will happen. With so many individuals making various choices it's a statistical inevitability that it will happen, at least to someone.
Sure, you're not morally responsible when it happens to you, but it's still stupid and avoidable.
But where do we draw the line? What's "risky behavior" that's NOT stupid? Because all behaviors are risky (anything going outside a fortified padded room).
Because the norms of the society at large can NOT be the guideline by which we judge such things. Driving without a seatbelt was standard in the 60s. Within the societal norm, but still stupid.
Having nude pictures on your locked phone only to have a police officer abuse his priveledge of being an officer of the law (where he has the power to do some pretty intimidating things) to steal that picture and make it a part of his pornstash. Outside the societal norm, but honestly it would never have gotten out there if there hadn't been a massive legal breach by someone who was meant to enforce those very laws. Who Watches The Watchers indeed.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
See my above post.
re: the bolded
Yes, the unspoken part of risk-reduction like this is that you are trying to make yourself a less appealing target than other people so that they will be the targets instead.
This is morally neutral behavior, it's not like you're the one breaking into the cars, if you make yourself un-appealing and they break into some other vehicle instead you benefited and are also still not responsible for what the criminal did.
Sure - there's lots of reasons why someone might jump headfirst into an enclosure with a dangerous animal, and some of them, with full knowledge, are even laudable (e.g., someone else fell in and you're going to help them); others are, as you point out, deplorable.
I don't think that changes my opinion that jumping in is still a dumb move.
And the thrust that I'm getting is that "reserving judgment for later" is never accepted as "even necessary." It is never okay to point out, "Hey - jumping into snake pits is a bad idea."
I mean, I got an email from the neighborhood watch warning of an increase in car break-ins in the area, and suggesting that we all make sure to lock our cars and keep valuables out-of-sight; they were also requesting increase police patrols in the wee morning hours when these seem to be occurring. Was that an inappropriate email? Was it only inappropriate if the person who recently had their car broken into was on the distro list?
Yes, it sucks that people suck enough that needing to lock your car and not openly display valuables in a non-secure location is a thing, but, similarly, I'm going to continue to lock my car and not leave my fat stacks of cash in the passenger seat because, while the moral culpability for stealing my bankroll would be on the person who actually opened the door and took my belongings, there's also no reason to do things that raise my profile as a potential target.
I dunno, man.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It seems the original problem had less to do with any sort of moral judgment and more a case of treating a symptom instead of a cause.
Which I was just thinking about after my last post, but I didn't want to argue with myself apropos of nothing because haha, that's crazy.
But it may be worth considering that even the most benign of advice, clearly given without assigning any moral responsibility may 1) be diverting attention away from the actual cause of the problem and 2) may be feeding into a social atmosphere that helps the people causing the problem rationalize, justify, whatever their actions.
Opportunity makes the thief, right? So we tell each other to minimize the opportunity, but then when the opportunity does come along, we all recognize that, well, here it is, somebody is bound to take advantage of it.
Also, it's clear that not every place is the same. As darkmayo and mcdermott have both mentioned, in some places it's fine to leave your backpack in the car. In other places, it's not.
Why is that the case, and can we make it so that it's not the case? Is advising people to not leave their backpack in the car working against us making it so that's not the case?
You can accomplish both things in a single remark, is what makes some of these examples particularly difficult to deal with.
Yes, I had the distinct impression I was being chastised. And he was right, I foolishly assumed the neighborhood was safer than it was.
One example: Password standards.
Over the last decade or so, we've seen the standard of online passwords rise. With mixed success, we've been able to circulate a few simple rules that users can use to make their passwords more secure (ie: mixed case, letters and numbers, ect.) There is some argument over the best set of rules, but in general, this development has made users more secure against malicious actors than they would be if they continued to use "password" and "12345."
Though it's less visible, we've also seen a lot of progress on the development side. It's become unacceptable for any serious website to store passwords and payment info in plain text, and common vulnerabilities in websites are much better understood than they were a decade ago. Large corporations receive significant backlash from their users when they are hacked, and that backlash is intensified if they failed to follow basic security standards.
Both of these developments seem to be universally agreed on as a good thing. I've never heard anyone level accusations of victim-blaming at someone giving advice on password standards, or at someone attacking a website for being hacked. Yet it seems to meet all the criteria: certainly it's the moral responsibility of the hacker not to steal people's credit card info, not the moral responsibility of the individual to protect against him. However, you can't stop the hacker directly (as he's probably in Russia and there are a million of him), so people make due with protecting themselves as best they can.
Would the world be better if there was no education on password standards or internet security? If anyone who tried to spread security knowledge was attacked as blaming victims? Probably not. We'd just have more crime, and no real way to avoid it.
So what is it about stealing a backpack from a car, or other crimes, that substantively differs from password security? In what way is the world improved if we moralize instead of teaching people how to reasonably protect themselves? How does that detract from the burden that already exists on a criminal to not commit crimes?
As a sidenote, I've heard several people in this thread mention enforcement as the answer, and it seems to come up a lot in these discussions. I have a pretty low opinion of enforcement-based solutions generally - I think if nothing else, the drug war should have taught us just how poorly "More enforcement" tends to work as a method of reducing crime. The fact that it gets so consistently gets trotted out as a solution seems to me to have more to do with people desire for retribution than any particular belief that it will make your house less likely to be robbed.
I think it can be both? I think it can be okay to point out that taking a nap on a bus stop bench with a wad of hundred dollar bills hanging out of your back pocket is a bad idea, while at the same time doing so is placing some onus of responsibility for any ensuing theft on the person taking the nap.
Which is to say, you can both give good advice and victim blame at the same time. As was postulated by @Just_Bri_Thanks early during this argument in the policing thread,
Of course you would tell your friend not to do something that was likely to end up with him/her measurably harmed in some fashion. Does that good intent somehow make what you said NOT victim blaming? No.
A statement can be both objectively victim blaming and something you probably ought to say to your friend anyway. The way it is framed can make you a giant shitlord.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
12345, that's the combination to my luggage!
Sure, I bat-signaled you because I was quoting you in a different thread than you made the post in. I'll make sure not to drag you into it in the future.
Part of the culture of victim blaming is not even realizing when we are doing it. Instead of empathizing with victims immediately following crimes we tend to always ask about mitigating behaviors like it matters, its just something we need to get better at as a society. Fuck we do it with everything, American Cancer society runs ads about lung cancer to stop the shaming people run through when they get lung cancer implying its only from smoking or working in dangerous smoke environments.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I'm not comfortable in making it illegal to share illegally obtained selfies without consent, because nude pictures on the internet don't have a label saying "These were illegally obtained"
however, I am comfortable making it illegal to share them if you're the one who illegally obtained them or a crime of some sort if you obtained them directly from that person and didn't report it
and cops should fucking immediately lose their jobs for keeping ANY PICTURES OFF OF A SUSPECTS ELECTRONIC DEVICE THAT AREN'T PERTINENT TO AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION
As much as I agree with the spirit of what you are going for in your second point, I feel like proving knowledge/malice is almost as hard in that case as it is in the first.
But the last thing I've read in the policing thread recently was that last one and boy was that a browser closing doozy.
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Would you say that the drug war is an example of police "putting the effort in"? They certainly seem to be applying a lot of effort to it. Perhaps there is more to it than that?
I've lived in a few different neighborhoods. Some of them were good, some were...less good. In the worse neighborhoods my car would be broken into a lot more often, while in the better neighborhoods it never happened to anyone I knew, or at least it was quite rare.
So what's the difference between a nice neighborhood and a bad one? It wasn't enforcement, at least not that I could tell. The nice neighborhoods don't have police officers roaming the streets looking for car thieves, and they often had only minimal police presence at all. If you did happen to get something stolen in a nice neighborhood, you'd generally get the same response from the police as you would anywhere else: "Sorry, better luck next time."
From what I could tell, the difference was the people who lived there. Nice neighborhoods tended to have less poverty, so the individuals in the neighborhood felt no particular desperation to steal from one another. They tended to have higher standards of education, so individuals were taught right from wrong. They tended to have an older population with much more of an established stake in society; people with houses and cars and kids have a lot more to lose stealing from a car than a homeless person looking for a fix.
Ratcheting up enforcement and telling officers to "put the effort in" is great if what you want is more poor minorities to be incarcerated. We've certainly seen how that plays out. If you want to actually reduce crime, the solutions seem to be education, rehabilitation, and an economy that gives real opportunities for everyone to survive, thrive, and invest in society. Calls for more enforcement seem to come from a similar place as victim blaming - anger and a desire to blame someone, even when blame hasn't ever been a very helpful tool of solving society's problems.
pleasepaypreacher.net
pleasepaypreacher.net
Who says it is an one or the other situation, we can certainly focus of root cause and attempt to resolve those but we all know that those are issues that aren't going to be solved overnight, so in the mean time take reasonable* steps to protect yourself and your property.
*reasonable is not the same for every person and every place.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Torn between wishing cops would ask people this and fearing it would lead to more toe licking and underwear extortion.