Blame The Victim (Just a Little)

“Don’t blame the victim,” people say, out of habit. The phrase has become a truism. Victims are without blame. Bad things happened to them, and it’s not their fault.

Wait. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Aren’t there situations when a victim deserves some share of the blame? If you’re in a bad situation, and you can escape, but you choose not to, are you really a victim? Are you entirely without blame? Shouldn’t you shoulder some of the responsibility for your situation?

(Now watch me carefully avoid gender issues, and talk specifically about lesbian relationships. And while we are in parentheses, let me add that all of the following dialogue is made-up. These are not actual quotes, although the stories are real.)

A woman – let’s call her “Susan” – calls up a sex and relationship advice show. Susan says she’s about to move in with her girlfriend, “Tabitha”. The two of them were packing some things at Susan’s apartment, getting ready for the move in a month or two. One of the items being packed was a shoe box full of old photographs.

“What’s this?” Tabitha asked.

“Oh, it’s old photos of people I know,” Susan said. “Old flames, old relationships. I haven’t looked at these in years.”

“You need to get rid of these pictures, if you’re going to move in with me.”

“Why?”

“I’m your girlfriend,” Tabitha said. “I should be enough for you now.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m completely serious.”

They had several fights about it, and Tabitha refused to back down on her demand. The photographs had to go.

Susan calls the sex advice show and asks: is Tabitha being reasonable? Is this crazy?

“Oh, and by the way,” Susan adds, “whenever I go away on business trips, Tabitha freaks out, convinced I’m having an affair. When I get back, I spend hours convincing her nothing is happening behind her back. Tabitha is jealous of all of my friends, and is starting to scare some of them away. In fact, I think Tabitha just wants me all to herself, out of jealousy and low self-esteem.”

Luckily for Susan, the host of the show is Dan Savage. He’s renowned for his clear, honest talk. He calls Susan and tells her in no uncertain terms:

Do not move in with Tabitha. This is an abusive relationship. Tell Tabitha to get a shrink to help her deal with her jealousy issues and insecurities. If she gets the help she needs, then re-evaluate moving in with her a year from now. If she refuses to get help, if she insists you move in together now, dump her. Save yourself. You are entering a very bad place.

As Savage tries to talk sense to Susan, she hems and haws, and tries to make excuses.

“I hear what you’re saying,” she says, “but Tabitha has had a really tough life. Really tough.”

You are not a social worker, Savage answers. You are not a therapist. Your girlfriend isn’t your pet project. She’s not a fixer-upper. Tabitha needs to get help on her own. You’re supposed to be with her as an equal, whom you love. Tabitha needs to fix herself.

Susan waffles some more, but half-heartedly agrees that maybe Dan Savage is right.

(After he’s done with the call, Dan Savage admits feeling a little guilty. Here’s Susan, struggling with her bully girlfriend Tabitha. And what did Dan do? Try to bully Susan into doing the right thing. Now she’s dealing with two bullies instead of one. All the same, Dan stands by his advice.)

Let’s assume the worst, and imagine that Susan completely ignores the advice she received.

“That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Susan tells herself. “He doesn’t know any of the details. I love Tabitha, and I know we can work through our problems. Tabitha has had a hard life, and I’m not about to abandon her just because she has a temper.”

Susan and Tabitha move in together. The relationship quickly sours. Tabitha is never physically violent, but she comes close, now and then. She’s definitely emotionally abusive, extremely jealous, and constantly demanding reassurances. Susan devotes way too much energy to keeping Tabitha sane. Susan has to constantly be on tiptoes, never knowing what she might do or say that sets Tabitha off. Despite all of Susan’s efforts, Tabitha gets crazier, more jealous, more emotionally unstable.

Say we enter the scene now. We don’t know the past; we know nothing of Susan’s earlier hesitations, or about her calling Dan Savage. What do we see? Who has what role?

Tabitha is the abuser. Susan is the victim.

(I’m trying to keep gender out of this, but maybe I’d better say this: we’d definitely assign the roles of abuser and victim if this relationship involved a cruel man and a suffering woman, instead of two women.)

As the “victim”, is Susan entirely without blame? Of course not. She should have known better, long before entering this relationship. She had misgivings. She got good advice – Dan Savage tried to warn her – and she ignored it.

What if Susan stays in a relationship with Tabitha for years, continuing to be abused and treated poorly? Can we really call her a “victim”? Or, on some level, is she doing this to herself? Tabitha is a monster – there’s no denying it. But shouldn’t Susan take some of the responsibility for her situation? She’s an adult. No matter what her psychological background and predispositions, she made a choice. Every day she stays with Tabitha, she renews that choice.

A week after Susan’s call to Dan Savage, another woman called. She praised Dan for advising Susan not to move in with Tabitha.

“Where were you 15 years ago?” she said, laughing. Then her laugh fell apart and she started to cry. Because 15 years ago, she entered an abusive relationship. She has stayed in it, for 15 long years, and she can’t take it anymore. She has lost all her friends and all her family. All she has is her abusive girlfriend. And she feels trapped.

Listening to her grief was extremely painful; it brought me close to tears. The woman was in agony.

Dan Savage’s advice to this caller was clear: You can escape. You have to escape. Listen to yourself. Listen to how much pain you are in. You have to get out of this situation. Call on your family or your old friends – even if you haven’t spoken to them in years. Tell them you fucked up, that you’re in an abusive relationship, and if they help you, you will make it up to them. You can get out of this. Your life may seem horrible, and you can’t imagine a world where you’re free, but you can be free. And then, once you escape, you can start building a new life for yourself – one where you get to be happy.

I genuinely hope this woman escapes her nightmare. Hearing her pain, even just through a phone call on a podcast, was heart-breaking.

Being in an emotionally abusive relationship creates a sense of powerlessness. There’s this other person, who is crazy, a nightmare, your enemy – but also your lover. You feel like you can’t do anything to escape. You want the relationship to work. This idea gets stuck in your head:

“If only I’m better, if only I work to save this, then things will improve. I have to be the sane one. I can’t make any demands of my partner. They’re under so much stress as it is.”

There are good days, and you feel like things are working out. There are bad days, and you somehow manage to shrug them off – even as things get worse over time.

You get stuck here, in this loop of misery.

If you ever hope to escape, you need to change how you think:

“I’m in a bad situation – but I’m letting this happen. I’m allowing it to exist. I’m not powerless. If I want things to change, I have to do things differently. I can get out of here.”

People say, “Don’t blame the victim.” Ironically enough, the only way to get out of the bad situation is for the victim to accept a small portion of the blame. They have to acknowledge they are doing nothing to change their situation, or that what they’ve done up until now isn’t working. They need to take some responsibility, struggle past that feeling of powerlessness, admit they have some control, and change their world.

Intellectually, none of this seems like a huge revelation to me. My argument strikes me as perfectly logical.

And yet emotionally, it goes against a lot of the things I’ve been taught in life. Some people are disadvantaged, stuck, struggling, but more or less doomed to their state. We make excuses for them. We can’t fault people for the position they find themselves in. “Blaming the victim” is harsh and judgemental and wrong. If you were in their shoes, would you be able to do any better? In some cases, yes, you could – but we’re not supposed to think that.

And we certainly can’t blame ourselves for our own problems. My troubles are caused by genetics, social forces, bureaucracies, things bigger than me. The deck is stacked against me. Nothing is my fault.

You can sum up all of this rationalizing nonsense in that phrase, “Don’t blame the victim.”

If victims really cannot be blamed for their trouble, then all you have to do to “solve” your problem is find a way to call yourself a victim. Someone else is making life hard for you. Whether it’s the government, large corporations, the way your parents raised you – someone else did this to you. Now you can fixate on them, and you’re blameless.

(Let me throw some exceptions out there: in almost all cases, children and rape victims aren’t to blame for what happened to them.)

I’m fat. I can blame all the crappy food in vending machines, McDonald’s, the way my parents fed me, or a hundred other factors. But, in the end, I’m the guy who puts the food in my mouth. So who else can I blame, besides myself? If I want to lose weight, I have to take responsibility for my own actions, and bring about change.

Drug addicts, the poor, workers trapped in dead end jobs, or anyone facing a situation they don’t like are all in the same boat. People need to take responsibility, take some of the blame, for at least some of their situation, and then choose to act differently. They need to throw away their victimhood, their sense of helplessness, and fight.

Forget the idea of not blaming the victim. Instead, think of it this way:

If you’re unhappy, admit you’re unhappy, and do something to pursue happiness.

Everything else is bullshit.


See also:

http://www.zurinstitute.com/victimhood.html