I’d like you, if you don’t mind, to join me in a thought experiment.
Consider for a moment, a man: he might be young or old, it doesn’t really matter. Tall or short, dark-haired or fair, dark skin or light; none of this matters.
All that matters is one thing: he is feeling vulnerable as he walks home tonight. He does not project confidence as he walks the dark city streets.
Perhaps he has been drinking: a swift pint or two after work. Not enough to give him artificial confidence, but enough to lower his vigilance, to make him less cautious than he should be. Perhaps not, though.
He doesn’t notice the guys in the shadows; or he does, but doesn’t register the danger. Or again, maybe he feels fear: but he’s got to get home, and there’s no other way.
Whichever it is, he tries to hurry past them, but the blows begin to fall. He tries to run, but they grab him and hit again. He crumples to the ground and rolls against a wall to get some protection. As the kicks start, he slips into unconsciousness.
Or again, imagine a child, at school. He – or she, their gender doesn’t matter this time – is one of the smaller, weaker ones in the class; or just isn’t as physically confident or brave as some of their classmates. Maybe this is the child of the man above; maybe not.
Bullying happens, of course: and this time it happens to the child we are talking about. Their life becomes hell. And it’s hard to find anyone to talk to about it. Parents don’t understand how bad it is. Teachers maybe don’t want to admit it’s happening.
Maybe they’ll find help from Childline, or similar. Maybe not.
What these stories have in common should be obvious: both protagonists were the victims of violent crimes.
Now, would you say – would anyone say – that these imaginary, but all too true, characters were in any way responsible for their suffering?
Of course not. No decent person – no-one with even the most basic shred of empathy and human decency – could blame the victim for the crime they suffered.
Yet blame the victim is apparently what one third of British people are prepared to do when the victim is a woman, and the violent crime is rape.
We’ve got a long way to go.
The discussion on swisstone’s journal suggests that the figures could be interpreted differently, and more importantly, that the questions could have been better phrased. But nonetheless, it is a chilling result.
I work at home two days a week and so I occasionally hear Woman’s Hour and I happened to catch it the day this story broke.
Two women were debating the matter. I would summarise the position that one of them took as follows.
Whilst rape is always wrong women have to bear some responsibility if they do stupid things. We expect all people (i.e. including women) to take sensible precautions with their property so it is reasonable to expect women to take sensible precautions with their own selves.
The analogy she used was of a woman walking off and leaving her handbag which was stolen and the enclosed car/house keys used to steal her car / burgle her house. In that situation she speculated that most people’s responce would be ‘stupid cow’ (I am pretty sure that is a correct quote) rather than ‘how awful’. Certainly her insurance company would not be particularly sympathetic.
Similarly if a woman gets drunk and then walks home alone through a dodgy part of town (rather than getting a cab or going with a friend) then whilst the rapist’s guilt is not diminished some blame must be laid at the woman door.
Summary ends.
That is a position that I find myself broadly in agreement with.
If a woman is dressed revealingly or flirts with a man that is no excuse for him if he rapes her.
Similarly walking alone, whilst drunk, in a dodgy part of town is no excuse for him and should not be used to get him off or to lessen his sentence. It might well weaken her case for compensation from the CICB, like leaving her handbag might weaken her position in claiming on her insurance.
I think that people are treating blame like a zero-sum game when I don’t think that is appropriate. If the woman takes some blame, through having done something stupid, that does not lessen the blame on the man.
If one replaces blame with responsibility or culpability I think that one’s view on the matter changes somewhat.
Ah, the difference between “has some responsibility for being in a dangerous situation” and “is to blame for being attacked”. Fair enough; and as the discussion I linked to suggested, the questionnaire was confusing, or poorly phrased.
But you don’t answer my thought experiment. Is the bullied child or the man walking home “responsible” in either sense?
Incidentally, I don’t mind anonymous posts if you’re not a LiveJournal user, but a name (or a URL, or whatever) would be nice, so I know who I’m talking to
The bullied child, no. The man, maybe.
If he had a choice about which way to walk home and chose the quicker way that was commonly known to be a bit dodgy then yes he has *some* responsibility. He has placed himself in harm’s way and for that he bears some responsibility.
If he is walking along a well lit high street and a gang run out at him from a side street then almost certainly not.
That is analogous to the
If you get in a car as a passenger (so you have no control over the car) and don’t put your seatbelt on and there is an accident (a drunk driver in another car hits your car, say) and you go flying through the windscreen and get injured far worse than if you had worn a seatbelt, then surely you bear some responsibility for teh degree of your injuries.
What if you are a rear seat passenger not wearing a seatbelt and so fly into the back of the front seat passenger and so compound their injuries, or even kill them.
The driver of the other car is responsible for the accident but you are reponsible for the degree of your own or the front seat passenger’s injuries.
After my previous post it occurred to me that, AFAIUI, the legal system take the view that responsibility is not a zero-sum game. Suppose that someone commits a crime and gets sentenced to 10 years. If two people commit an identical crime they will get 10 years each, not five a piece.
The bullied child, no. The man, maybe.
If he had a choice about which way to walk home and chose the quicker way that was commonly known to be a bit dodgy then yes he has some< \b> responsibility. He has placed himself in harm’s way and for that he bears some responsibility.
If he is walking along a well lit high street and a gang run out at him from a side street then no.
That is analogous to the rape case in my previous post. The drunk woman walking alone in a dodgy area bears some reponsibility. The woman (drunk or sober) on a well lit high street looking for a cab to take her home does not.
If you get in a car as a passenger (so you have no control over the car) and don’t put your seatbelt on and there is an accident (a drunk driver in another car hits your car, say) and you go flying through the windscreen and get injured far worse than if you had worn a seatbelt, then surely you bear some responsibility for the degree of your injuries.
What if you are a rear seat passenger not wearing a seatbelt and so fly into the back of the front seat passenger and so compound their injuries, or even kill them.
The driver of the other car is responsible for the accident but you are reponsible for the degree of your own or the front seat passenger’s injuries.
After my previous post it occurred to me that, AFAIUI, the legal system take the view that responsibility is not a zero-sum game. Suppose that someone commits a crime and gets sentenced to 10 years. If two people commit an identical crime they will get 10 years each, not five a piece.
I’m not.
Do you mean you haven’t guessed!? I thought I gave you< \b> enough clues.
More seriously there is a point about anonymous posting that makes the reader evaluate the words and not the poster.
If you know and like me then if I post something that does not sit well with you, you will cut me some slack, thinking that what I have written may not have reflected what I actually meant.
If you know and dislike me then if I post something that you broadly agree with you may well, albeit subconsciously, look for things to disagree with, as you have disagreed with everything I have posted before.
However this is seriously OT.
Sorry, bit of a balls up there.
I thought I had accidentally pressed the Preview button and so just went back but I must have pressed the Post Comment button, hence the partial post.
Then I managed to use the wrong type of slash.
The relevant places should have read
If he had a choice about which way to walk home and chose the quicker way that was commonly known to be a bit dodgy then yes he has some responsibility. He has placed himself in harm’s way and for that he bears some responsibility.
and
Do you mean you haven’t guessed!? I thought I gave you enough clues.
This is what comes from accidentally sending a work email from my home address while working from home, isn’t it, Mr O?
Certainly is.
Your sig includes “Gratuitous blog-promotion: http://livejournal.com/~devilgate” and I had to have a look at what was there.