individual to avoid being attacked erase the lived experiences of so many of us. We want to reiterate that no matter the circumstances, victim-survivors are not responsible for crimes or violence committed against them. Our hope and commitment for the future is that you never are made to feel like violence was your fault, and instead that you feel cared for and supported by the institution you’ve entrusted with your safety and education.
This kind of overwrought response to initiatives designed to spur people to be more proactive about personal safety has become not only culturally entrenched but impolitic to rebut.
The reaction of course stems from the traditional offensive response to women's rape claims, along the lines of "you were asking for it, wearing that dress", or "what did you expect, with a skirt that short?". It's a fine line, but while respecting the victims' suffering, and placing all the blame on the perpetrators, it should still be possible to offer sensible advice to make life safer without provoking such a backlash. Acknowledging a victim’s responsibility for their own safety doesn't mean absolving the attacker.
Of course, the point of these safety memos is not to apportion blame for crimes that have already occurred so much as to publicize best practices for preventing new crimes. It is absurd to propose that furnishing a general audience with actionable advice on safety somehow stigmatizes people who—quite possibly despite their own best efforts—have been victimized. Yes, your car might be stolen even if you lock it and take the keys, but does that mean that no one should remind us to lock our cars and take our keys? Or to use a more timely example, advising people to mask and maintain social distance does not victim-shame those who have already contracted COVID, some of whom no doubt caught the disease despite masking and maintaining distance. Still, the activists suppress.
It’s a kind of punitive narcissism: the condition whereby your desire not to be reminded of your misfortune outweighs my right to be equipped to avoid the same misfortune. But even taken at face value, the activists’ notion that we can never correlate outcomes with predisposing behaviors is an argument that we apply nowhere else in life. Such reasoning negates the eminent behavioristic goal of learning from one’s mistakes. Logically speaking, it also negates entire major fields of inquiry—say, epidemiology, which is wholly dependent on the strategy of cataloging possible causative factors over time and drawing logical inferences about common denominators and outcomes. In most walks of life, it is assumed that growth is an ongoing process of self-reflection: What worked? What didn’t?
It's also a denying of personal agency, in a world where victimhood comes to be seen almost as a state of grace.
Leave a Reply