I'd like to put forwards the notion that the damaging attitude of "victim blaming" is in fact a coping mechanism to deal with fear and pain.
It's far less scary (and painful) to say, "this person was foolish, they really messed up here - they should have been more careful!" than to say, "this other person made a conscious decision to act in a way that is truly evil." If rape is labelled as an evil act, we have to accept that Humanity, as a species, is capable of acts of evil, and that each individual has the potential to commit these and similar acts. This is a frightening conclusion!
Much easier is to instead label rape as a mistake, because, due to the fact that we as individuals make at least one mistake a day (and that's being generous) and we as a species make at least one collective, corporate mistake every week or so (and that's being naïve), we're OK with the inherent human potential for screwing up. When I say "OK with," of course, I mean "comfortable with the concept, if not the specific instance."
This, with what is often perceived as being a big mistake, leads to a "should-have-known-better" mentality towards rape. "I may forget to buy soap or lose thousands on the stock market, but there was no way of preventing these things, not really. But someone is a victim of rape? Well, they should have known better than to dress provocatively or to drink alcohol or to go out in that particular part of town!" The people taking this attitude feel that they and theirs do know better, and therefore have nothing to fear - they're not going to make a mistake, their daughters are smarter than the girls they hear about on the news!
If, as we really should, we view rape as an evil act, then, oh, my goodness, even smart, sober, wholesomely dressed people would need to be afraid as well! (As a weighty aside: the fact that even good, clean folks can fall victim to rape reinforces an important point - it's never the victim's fault. Never. As I once read: "all rape victims have one thing in common: they met a rapist." The entirety of fault always falls on the attacker. End of.)
What I'm definitely not saying here is that everyone should be afraid of rape, murder, assault, or whatever, but what I am saying is that a) it's really easy to slip into fear and b) it's much easier to cast blame onto the victim than to live in a place of easily-acquired fear.
It's also easy to say that victim-blamers hate women. Harder is to say that the blamers are afraid, because then we have to admit that, to be honest, we kind of are, too.
It's far less scary (and painful) to say, "this person was foolish, they really messed up here - they should have been more careful!" than to say, "this other person made a conscious decision to act in a way that is truly evil." If rape is labelled as an evil act, we have to accept that Humanity, as a species, is capable of acts of evil, and that each individual has the potential to commit these and similar acts. This is a frightening conclusion!
Much easier is to instead label rape as a mistake, because, due to the fact that we as individuals make at least one mistake a day (and that's being generous) and we as a species make at least one collective, corporate mistake every week or so (and that's being naïve), we're OK with the inherent human potential for screwing up. When I say "OK with," of course, I mean "comfortable with the concept, if not the specific instance."
This, with what is often perceived as being a big mistake, leads to a "should-have-known-better" mentality towards rape. "I may forget to buy soap or lose thousands on the stock market, but there was no way of preventing these things, not really. But someone is a victim of rape? Well, they should have known better than to dress provocatively or to drink alcohol or to go out in that particular part of town!" The people taking this attitude feel that they and theirs do know better, and therefore have nothing to fear - they're not going to make a mistake, their daughters are smarter than the girls they hear about on the news!
If, as we really should, we view rape as an evil act, then, oh, my goodness, even smart, sober, wholesomely dressed people would need to be afraid as well! (As a weighty aside: the fact that even good, clean folks can fall victim to rape reinforces an important point - it's never the victim's fault. Never. As I once read: "all rape victims have one thing in common: they met a rapist." The entirety of fault always falls on the attacker. End of.)
What I'm definitely not saying here is that everyone should be afraid of rape, murder, assault, or whatever, but what I am saying is that a) it's really easy to slip into fear and b) it's much easier to cast blame onto the victim than to live in a place of easily-acquired fear.
It's also easy to say that victim-blamers hate women. Harder is to say that the blamers are afraid, because then we have to admit that, to be honest, we kind of are, too.
Disclaimer: I am of course aware that I could be using all this as a coping mechanism for the fact that human males have the potential to hate women, and that I could therefore subconsciously fear that I too am capable of hating women... but then we could go down that rabbit hole 'til the Sun goes out...
