Victim Blaming

People in our society are so eager to blame victims, even when they have seemingly nothing to gain. People often follow the principle of “presumption of guilt” rather than "presumption of innocence". When a victim is compelled to fight for a “right”, many people do not realize that the “right” has been denied to the victim. When a false charge victimizes some people, the larger portion of people in our society may enjoy the situation believing that the world is in a just order.

Victims threaten our sense that the world is a safe and moral place, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When bad things happen to good people, it implies that no one is safe, that no matter how good we are, we too could be vulnerable. The idea that misfortune can be random, striking anyone at any time, is a terrifying thought, and yet we are faced every day with evidence that it may be true.

In experiments where the victim is, by design completely innocent but still punished, people tend to blame the victim. The unschooled public largely and erroneously believes that convictions are mostly obtained through the use of one form of tangible evidence or another.