Why Do We Blame Victims?

"Attention seeking slut"

"A woman should know better than to go to her boss's hotel room."

"Of course if he wears tight pants to work, he’s gonna get butt slapped."

"She took 6 years to report?!! She must be lying!"

When Did we Start Blaming Others?

I’d promised a piece called “Is it my Fault I get Sexually Harassed?” but I got stuck. I needed to work out the other half of the equation - victim blaming. There has been so much written about how wrong it is, how it stops victims reporting, how it doesn’t stop sexual harassment or sexual violence. Yes, we know victim blaming is destructive. But I wanted to go deeper. What is it about human nature - the need to blame someone else rather than accept that we have hurt another?

Did it start in childhood? Parents confront their children: Who took the donut? Who split the paint? Who started it? - and are used to the immediate response - He did it! She started it! He made me!

My 3 year old daughter having no sibling to blame, would point to our cat, Cory. Each day I’d return home to find Cory snoozing under his latest Banksy effort. Finally I gave up and told Cory he was welcome to paint because it gave the walls such personality. “I did it!” proclaimed my daughter. No way was our cat getting the credit for her work.

As children, needing our parent’s approval is crucial. If we broke a vase, we’d hide it and pray Mommy wouldn’t find out. Vase breakers are “bad” people. Would our parents still want us if we are bad?

If Alex broke my lego tower, the four year old me hit him. Alex would scream bringing the adults running. Caught for hitting, my first response would be to yell, he broke my tower! Of course I hit him, but I was justified. Hitting, on it’s own, would make me a “bad” person. If I am bad, my parents won’t love me. If I’m unworthy of love, I can’t love myself. I can’t face that. It’s so much easier to blame Alex for breaking my tower. Alex of course, would blame me for hitting him, absolving him from his initial crime of knocking over my tower. Image of the rubble, post Alex. Photo by Rick Mason on Unsplash

Of course a four year old isn’t going to analyse all this, but most 40 year olds don’t either.

Imagine this happening every day. I can’t handle accepting responsibility for my own wrongdoing because it affects my own sense of identity. So I blame others who provoked me. I rationalise to myself - victims tend to get sympathy. They’re not bad. They’re just victims. 

Every day. Years go by. 

The child is now an adult. He has never had to self reflect on his own actions, instead taking the easier course - deflecting blame onto others. We all do it to an extent. We blame traffic for being late. We blame another team at work for not being able to complete our task. In a workplace with a strong blame culture and where people fear losing their job, finger pointing is even more common. The stakes are higher with sexual harassment.

We Are Never the Bad Guy, so Someone Else has to be

There is a nuance between “bad actions” and the “bad actor”. I put the word bad in parenthesis because bad is a label and is subjective. Last night I watched a Channel 4 documentary (Teachers Training to Kill) about arming teachers with guns. During a simulation, a teacher with a gun who had forgotten her role, asked, “am I the bad guy or the good guy?” 

As they were trained to shoot to kill, they were told a student with a gun was a “bad guy”, completely disregarding mental illness as a possibility. Here in the UK, audiences were horrified. But see how easy it can be to justify killing - just label him a “bad guy”. 

“The only way to take down a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”

We tend to regard the “Other" as the “bad guy”. We ourselves could never be on the bad side. If you were Vietnamese and believed in communism after decades of being poor while the rich elite exploited you, you’d see the American military as the “bad guys”. In the Middle East strife, can you really work out the “bad guys” from the “good guys”? If you were with the Empire (the establishment), you’d see Luke Skywalker and his Rebels as the “bad guys”. One man’s terrorist, is another man’s freedom fighter.

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash

I’ve met religious people, torn about being gay or having an abortion. This would make me a bad person, they say. It’s a battle between their deeper self and the beliefs they feel bound to.

If they can’t accept themselves through the need to be morally right, ironically their darkness grows. They end up attacking gays or abortion clinics. Are they bad? Good? It depends which side you’re on.

How about dropping the label altogether?

It’s time we accept that we all have a dark side. That doesn’t make us bad. It just means that there is a dark side.

Sexual Harassment and Introspection

So let’s play this out with sexual harassment. 

You’re the senior partner at a big law firm. You’ve made a name for yourself in human rights. You’ve done fantastic work. To win cases, your team works long hours, weekends too. You know young lawyers want to work with you for the prestige. It’s perfectly acceptable for you to yell at them when they make mistakes. That toughens them up. They need to survive and master the courtroom. It’s all part of the training. No one disagrees with you. But that’s because from your years of experience, you’re always right. They are learning from you.

There are some pretty young lawyers too. You love cracking sex jokes. They laugh along. It makes you feel desired. Sometimes you ask about their sex life. They let you hug them. That was the norm when you were a young lawyer. No one blinked an eye. You thrive on people looking up to you.

Then one day, a lawyer claims you sexually harassed her. How will you respond?

I think we know the answer. I grew up in the legal profession, and let’s face it, lawyers have big egos. That doesn’t make them bad. It just means it’s harder for them to self reflect and admit they were wrong. 

If you are told you have sexually harassed someone, you are likely to revert to childhood patterns: to survive, you need approval. Your identity as a good person is under threat. You can’t even face the possibility that you might have done something wrong. Unless we separate action from person, we equate doing something wrong with being a bad person. Deep down we feel shame, but cannot bring ourselves to admit this.

So how do we react when accused? After the initial shock, most people would deny it happened or blame someone else. We would rationalise our conduct. All too often this falls back to the familiar it was her fault mode. We don’t even realise what we are doing. Without thinking, you would blurt out, “I didn’t mean to!” 

Image: Definition of Sexual Harassment in England, Citizen’s Advice Bureau

Unlike rape and sexual assault, which are crimes, intention is not an element of sexual harassment. You don’t have to intend to sexually harass someone. It happens when the person harassed feels threatened, uncomfortable or intimidated.

So we would justify our behaviour - I thought she liked it. She never complained. He didn’t stop me. He was drunk. 

What we have done is shift the blame from ourselves onto the victim. A person’s harassing conduct can start quite early on in their career. If, as a young executive, we refuse to accept that our sexual banter hurt Shamila from Accounting - we have missed a valuable lesson. We might dismiss Shamila as overly sensitive instead self reflecting: what did I do that made Shamila uncomfortable? What are the things that I say or do that can hurt my colleagues (or anyone for that matter)? Can I own up to the fact that I have hurt her and it was wrong of me to do so? 

Once you’ve analysed your own behaviour (rather than analysing her) and realise you have been hurtful or dismissive, your apology to Shamila would be genuine. 

No, “I am sorry if you felt offended,” is not an apology. “I am sorry for my behaviour which I realise was hurtful,” is. See the difference? Which apology shows personal accountability and which one places the onus (or blame) on the other?

If you have never accepted responsibility for a sex joke, it’s going to be harder to recognise when you have crossed the line with bigger offences which could get you fired or your reputation ruined.

Image: Bill O’Reilly was fired from Fox News after several sexual harassment scandals. He paid about $45million in settlements.

When we have gone through this self reflection enough times, we will notice the next time we fall back into auto-harassment mode. For instance, at lunch with colleagues, a pause in the conversation signals the perfect entry for a sex joke. The old us would have launched right into it and ignored the uncomfortable laughs. We remember how it hurt someone the last time, and we stop. We don’t resent that our “right to free speech in the name of political correctness” is denied us. Instead we become aware of the feelings of those around us. We have become mindful and empathetic - traits so needed in the workplace. And schools... and in politics! 

When Someone We Know is Accused

The need to victim-blame also arises when we see others being accused of sexual harassment. Perhaps the harasser is a friend or a person we look up to. In 2017, one by one, my favourite celebrities were falling to #MeToo claims. If I had not been trained in sexual harassment, I might have joined the voices questioning the women (and men) who dare accuse my favourite actors. My daughter and I still argue about Johnny Depp because I doubted Amber Heard.

I have felt conflicted when friends were accused of sexual harassment, but knew better than to join the victim blaming chorus. Yet I couldn’t quite turn it into a teaching moment for them. They themselves were quite broken. It’s something, as an advocate that I still ponder - how do I work with harassers through that inner realisation process?

This stems from a place of loyalty and wanting to support those who are close to us.

The Social Media Blame Game

Then there are the armchair critics. 

We’ve all seen the online vitriol thrown at #MeToo victims. Mainly men (and sometimes women), they accuse victims of attention seeking, inviting the sexual harassment or making it up. Why didn’t she report it at the time, they demand? I’ve written why in Men, This is Why Women Stay Silent When Sexually Harassed.

What compels the public to victim blame? After all, they don’t know the victim or the harasser.

The most bizarre thing is that Trump, not known for deep thinking, came up with one answer.

The fear of being accused. This doesn’t mean the victim blamers have done anything wrong, but somewhere deep down, is that fear … it could happen to me. 

“It’s only difficult if you’re a man with something to hide.”

Idris Elba

The fear of being found out.

What if I have sexually harassed? 

The problem for most of us is that we don’t know when we’ve crossed the line. Sure, everyone knows rape and physically forcing oneself on another is a crime. But sexual harassment is murkier territory. Unless you are mindful of those around you, chances are you have committed sexual harassment. 

What! Me, no, never. I am not a sexual harasser. I am a good person. 

If you see yourself as a law abiding church goer, how does a priest being accused of sexual abuse fit in with your world view? It certainly challenges it. You may think if a priest is bad, what does that make me? The world is no longer black and white. Not being able to fit ourselves, others and our behaviour into neat little categories is very disconcerting. The more adventurous souls (commonly labeled rebels) may explore how this feels and are prepared to readjust their world view. They may stop going to church and incur the wrath of their family and community. If our need to belong to our tribe is stronger than our courage in breaking free, then introspection can be terrifying. 

Instead of looking within ourselves and accepting that we are not perfect, we look outside and lash out at the powerless one: the victim. Or we lash out at those who challenge our worldview, labelling them as “feminazis”, “liberals” or “snowflakes”. 

It is much easier to blame all victims than acknowledge that our own behaviour could be hurtful, harmful and disrespectful of women, men and most tragically - children.

So next time you find yourself with the urge to blame a #MeToo survivor or make excuses for the harasser on Twitter, pause and ask yourself, What’s going on here? 

How do I feel if this claim is true?

Am I scared, angry, confused, sad, ashamed?

Know this: there is absolutely nothing wrong with having negative feelings. Just noticing them is a huge step. You might be curious and wonder why you are feeling this way. Most people would - and this can be a revelatory journey. 

The very fact that you have paused and looked within, takes you out of the blame mode. It’s no longer about the victim or even the harasser. It is about yourself. Our responses to others and events reveal a great deal about ourselves. 

Blaming the victim is the easy way out. It takes courage to stop and ask why. 

Here come the caveats!

I am not a psychologist and I welcome comments from the profession. What I’ve written here is through years of research and working with harassment, raising a child, going through my own dark night of the soul and supporting women going through theirs (through the Feminine Power programme).

Like many, my default setting has long been to blame others or situations. When I see that deep survival instinct kick in, I know it’s a trigger for something deeper. My next response is to pause and ask, what’s going on inside? I used to hate what I saw, but over the years, I learnt to stop judging myself in a desperate need to be “good” or “right”, and instead, with compassion and curiosity, enquired into that need. 

I have been forced to, by a daughter who will not let me blame the cat. 

Wait.... did I just blame my daughter?

How we can help

Over the next few months, as we answer Questions About Sexual Harassment, we will explore what makes workplaces unsafe and how we make them safer. We explore the world of predators and where they can thrive. We explain how you can confront sexual harassers -whether you are a victim, a bystander or the boss. 

2021 Update:

Animah founded The Speak Up Collective - an online global platform inviting people to co-create Speak Up Cultures in their own organisations - safe, inclusive and thriving work environments where people are empowered to speak up on things that matter - like sexual and other forms of harassment, safety, bribery & corruption, mismanagement and other concerns. Within The Collective, there is a private group for people who want to address sexual harassment in the workplace.

This article is the fifth in our #QUASH series (Questions About Sexual Harassment) which is a weekly column by www.speakupatwork.com for 2019. We are inviting questions about workplace sexual harassment and will answer them throughout the year. If you have any questions, you can ask them on LinkedIn or Twitter or share with The Speak Up Collective.

Read our previous #QUASH articles:

Do Men Get Sexually Harassed?

What do I do When a Sexual Harassment Scandal Breaks Out at Work?

Can I Ask a Colleague Out on a Date?

Here’s Why Sexual Harassment Isn’t a Crime