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A lot of people say “why can’t we criticize rape victims’ behavior? I mean, I agree that no one should commit rape; it’s a horrible crime. But you have to admit that there are some things that can increase your risk of being raped.”
I certainly agree.
For instance, 27% of perpetrators of rape are a spouse or romantic partner– a statistic that is particularly startling given that most people only have one spouse or romantic partner at a time, while they generally have several relatives, friends, acquaintances, and strangers they see in passing. Of the people you interact with in your day to day life, your spouse or romantic partner is by far the most likely to rape you. And no wonder! Most people regularly put themselves in a vulnerable position around their spouses and romantic partners: they sleep next to them, spend time around them naked and unarmed, and even have sex with them.
And it’s easy enough to avoid the risk, isn’t it? You have essentially complete control over whether you have a romantic partner. All you have to do is be celibate and not have any romantic relationships; to be on the safe side, you should probably also avoid platonic primary relationships, because most of the being-in-a-vulnerable-position-around-others concerns still apply, even though those are rare enough that they don’t show up in the data. Surely that’s a tiny price to pay for a reduction in your risk of getting raped, right?
(And there are other benefits! Current research suggests that it is very uncommon to be a victim of intimate partner violence if you don’t have an intimate partner.)
And, hey, how come these helpful people never talk about men? If you include men who are forced to penetrate women, year-to-year, men are as likely to be raped as women. Therefore, no man should ever get drunk or high unless he’s alone in a locked room, because a woman might rape him while he’s intoxicated. We should probably close down bars altogether. Or maybe they should be gender-segregated? We can have a heterosexual female bar and a heterosexual male bar, all flirting strictly prohibited. (Sorry, LGB people, you’re out of luck. It’s locked rooms for you guys.)
That doesn’t make any goddamn sense? I agree! For a lot of people, a primary relationship is one of the most fundamental sources of strength and happiness in their life, and sex and romance are really fun for most people. It’s smart to take reasonable precautions– don’t fuck people who violate small boundaries because they might violate big ones– but ultimately you just have to accept that dating people does increase your risk of being raped, and that you’ll take a small increase in your chance of being raped in exchange for not coming home to an empty twin bed for the rest of your life. Similarly, many men enjoy getting drunk with their friends; they don’t want to decrease their risk of getting raped at the cost of all their drunken half-remembered camaraderie.
The same thing is true of any other behavior people criticize in rape victims. I occasionally walk alone at night, because I did the cost-benefit analysis and decided that the low risk of being raped by a stranger on a street corner was outweighed by being able to get snacks at 2 am when I want them. Other people get drunk in public because, for them, the risk of being raped when drunk is outweighed by the enjoyment of getting drunk at bars.
(You might argue that perhaps these people are making an incorrect tradeoff. But in my experience there is not exactly an absence of the message that rape sucks really hard and you are more likely to be raped if you are drunk; I suspect all women who go out drinking are fully informed of the risks.)
This is, I think, a taboo tradeoff. Rape is the Worst Thing In The World. You’re not supposed to make reasonable cost-benefit analyses about the Worst Thing In The World and decide what is an acceptable risk to run. There is no such thing as an acceptable risk of the Worst Thing In The World! Can’t you read? It’s the Worst Thing In The World!
So here’s the corollary: If a person takes a calculated risk, and they get the bad outcome, they didn’t do anything wrong– even from a prudential perspective. If I offer to give you a thousand dollars if the coin comes up heads if you give me fifty dollars if the coin comes up tails, and it came up tails, this does not magically make the bet a bad bet. If I die in a car crash, that does not magically make my decision to ride in a car instead of taking a bus everywhere a bad decision, even though buses are safer. And if I decide that I really like partying and I’m willing to take a risk of being raped, and then I am raped, it does not magically make my decision a bad decision.
(The thought that it does is called hindsight bias, by the way.)
The rape victim did not make an unwise decision; they made a wise decision that, unfortunately, due to circumstances outside their control, turned out poorly. They are not at fault and should not change their behavior. The only person in this situation who ought to change their behavior is the rapist, on account of they violently attacked someone.
jossedley said:
Presumably, there’s a middle ground, where we can share good advice about how to avoid crime without denying that the crime is still wrong.
If somebody tells me “hey, it’s a good idea to get a bike lock” when they see me leaving my bike unlocked outside of class, we all understand that (1) it would still be a crime if someone took my unlocked bike, but (2) seriously, I should go get a lock.
It’s super gross and immoral to argue that a criminal shouldn’t be punished because the victim didn’t take more precautions, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who couldn’t be helped by proactive advice about risks.
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jossedley said:
Sorry Ozy – I should always read your posts twice before responding. Yes, I agree 100% that we shouldn’t criticize individual survivors’ behavior.
We also shouldn’t leery that value prevent is from making sure people are fully informed of risks and preventative strategies so they can make informed decisions, which wasn’t what you were arguing for, but I sometimes see.
(Lastly, sometimes when consent is disputed, sometimes behavior is relevant, if uncomfortable. If I say I didn’t consent and someone else says I did, pointing out that I texted the next day that “I had a great time” isn’t criticism, it’s just another data point regarding what might have happened, but you didn’t stay that either)
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Gazeboist said:
I would also understand that (3) they’re kind of a dick. Unsolicited advice is almost always rude, at least in my book.
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jossedley said:
I guess there’s a question of context. I helped move my daughter to college this fall, and one of the volunteers pulled me aside and advised me to disable the quick release on the seat to avoid theft. In that context, I didn’t take offense, but you’re right that in general, the warner in my hypo would come across as patronizing.
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deciusbrutus said:
That seems to imply that educating potential rape victims about non-obvious things that might increase their chance of being raped is obligatory, since that allows them to make better cost/benefit decisions.
It also implies something about how bad rape is or isn’t, given the benefits gained in exchange for the change in risk that a given person finds acceptable.
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osberend said:
And note that plenty of college feminists are very against such education, because they view it as itself somehow constituting “victim blaming.”
When I was in That Fucking Group, one member noted that an earlier incarnation of That Fucking Group had been so clueless that they had actually distributed rape whistles and everyone else nodded along about how ridiculous and bad that was.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Why obligatory though?
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MugaSofer said:
Utilitarianism?
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tcheasdfjkl said:
@MugaSofer
Some conceptions thereof, I guess? Ozy has posted before about how utilitarianism doesn’t actually require doing the best possible thing at all times, it just provides a way to rank possible actions without saying “you must do [the best action]/[one of the top X% best actions] in order to be a good person”.
Also, there is a cost to telling people about risks, and the benefit has to be weighed against that cost.
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michaelkeenan0 said:
Can you link to some examples of the kind of victim-blaming you’re talking about? I don’t think I entirely get what is or isn’t an okay thing to say, and the sarcastic tone of the first few paragraphs makes it harder to understand.
If there’s no particular victim, is it okay to talk about it? Like, visiting ISIS-held territory, or visiting parts of South Africa, or going to prison, seem like they might be rape-increasing choices. Is it okay to talk about that? I think the rule might be that we shouldn’t mention the risky things that a *particular* victim did, but I’m not sure.
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osberend said:
This seems like a reasonable response to a lot of criticisms of rape victims’ behavior, but not all. Because, after all, sometimes people do things which greatly increase their risk of being raped, and which provide them with negligible or negative utility apart from that. To take an actual example, relating to a specific person I know (cw: drugs, IPV, rape, etc., in more detail than the post goes into, and I suppose arguably “victim blaming” as well):
Dating someone who systematically emotionally abuses you, tries to force you to do heroin, exploits you financially, and literally does nothing kind or caring for you unless you count the fact of nominally dating you in the first place (which you shouldn’t, duh) is clearly negative utility. If that person is pretty blatantly a physical coward, and you have multiple male friends and first-degree relatives who are all larger than them and would all be more than willing to use that fact to restrain them if they came around looking for you and wouldn’t take “she said to fuck off” for an answer, and you don’t live or work with them, then the risk of stopping dating them is essentially zero.
And if that person has already raped you while you were passed out, and bragged about having done so to you the next day, then if you keep dating them, they’re undoubtedly going to keep raping you. If they’ve also (non-consensually) injured you in non-sexual ways, not even out of anger but just for fun, then some of your future rapes are probably going to be a whole lot worse than that first one too.
Now, what if any modes of criticism are actually going to be helpful to someone who is sufficiently fucked up in the head that they’d stay (or get) in such a relationship to begin with is not altogether clear to me. (Frankly, I think the best solution is to just cripple or kill the perpetrator, and in the particular case I’m think of, I wish to the gods that I’d known about the extent of what the perp was doing it while it was still happening, because I would gladly have gone after that piece of shit with a baseball bat.) But dealing with reality has to start with acknowledging that yeah, that’s some fucking stupid behavior right there, with very predictable consequences.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
It is a known common effect of being in an abusive relationship that one comes to feel trapped and does not feel able to leave, or loses their ability to understand that they should leave. Like, yeah, leaving is the better choice, but given that abuse predictably often has the result that people don’t leave their abuser, I think it’s best to think of abuse as kind of similar to drugging someone – it’s a way of messing with their mind. It would be ridiculous to say “you can tell he’s going to rape you because he drugged you, and it’s really stupid that you’re going unconscious instead of running away” and I contend that “it’s really stupid that you’re not leaving this person who abused you” is similarly ridiculous given the common effects of abuse.
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Lambert said:
Isn’t the solution then to find out empirically how best to persuade and help people to leave abusive relationships.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Yes. I’m not sure if that work currently exists.
If it turns out that shaming someone for staying in an abusive relationship is the most effective way to get them to leave, then it’s probably worth it. (Note: this is a tradeoff, where you have to weigh [saying unkind things that the person doesn’t deserve] against [them staying in an abusive relationship].)
But I kind of doubt that is actually true. I frequently see the advice, from people whose judgment I generally trust on topics like this, that when someone in your life is a victim of abuse, the best thing to do is to respect their agency. If you act judgey and lecture them every time you see them, they’re not gonna want to spend time with you – and that will isolate them further in an already isolating sitaution, and that will make it harder for them to leave later on because they’ll have fewer friends left outside the relationship. This doesn’t mean you should pretend you think their abuser is a good person; in the advice I see, it’s suggested that you can gently make your opinion known when relevant, like “wow, that sounds really unkind” or “I’m sorry you’re going through that, you don’t deserve that” or “this is your choice, but I think you would be happier if you left your partner. if you ever decide you want to do that, let me know and I’ll be happy to help.”
In my own life, when someone (*cough*parents*cough*) loudly judges me for choices I’ve made in every interaction with them, then even if I agree that the choices in question are not the best choices, I take steps to limit the time I spend with that person. They may be right about what the best choice for me is (though: not in all situations!!), but if they can’t accept my sovereignty over my own life, I will limit my exposure to them because they are stressful people for me. It is often much easier to know what the best choice is than to actually make that choice.
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osberend said:
Your analogy seems clearly off to me. When under the effect of a sufficient dose of sedatives, whether to fall asleep is simply not a choice.
In contrast, you can’t actually make a human who is old enough to have the capacity for conscious analysis of statements believe something, at least not by simply saying things to them, possibly punctuated by physical violence. All you can do is present them with statements that they can choose to accept or reject.
If you’re a skilled abuser, then you choose your statements (and who you’re making them to) so as to make it a lot harder to reject them than to accept them. You make accepting what you’re saying the path of least resistance. But whether to take the path of least resistance or not is still a choice, and doing so when it means accepting what an abuser is telling you about yourself is a bad choice.
On your second comment, I’m not sure why you jumped from “criticizing their choices” to “shaming them.” Do you think that “this thing you’re doing is stupid, and is predictably going to result in you keeping getting hurt” inherently constitutes shaming? Really?
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Nita said:
Shaming is counter-productive, IMO.
One of the ways how abusers persuade their victims to stay is by convincing them that they’re terrible and should be grateful that the abuser puts up with them; that if anyone else found out how pathetic/evil/annoying they are, they would treat them even worse than the abuser does. Shaming the victims plays right into that narrative — “your judgment is so bad that you don’t deserve any respect”. At least abusers tend to give occasional gestures of love and affection, determined shamers don’t offer even that much.
I don’t think you understand how human psychology works.
90% of people in that situation will parse this as “you are stupid, and if you tell me that you got hurt, I will gloat because I think you deserve it”.
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Nita said:
Also, the more you lower the status of being a victim, the harder people will try to avoid that status by clinging to alternative stories in their own minds.
“I’m not being abused, I’m virtuously enduring some tough times For the Sake of Our True Love.”
“I’m not being abused, I just have a really aggravating personality, and sometimes it makes my partner act out.”
“I’m not being abused, that only happens to weak people, I’m strong and I can take anything fate throws my way.”
“I’m not being abused, all relationships involve some violence, anyone who says otherwise is naive or lying.”
“I’m not being abused, we both hurt each other, so we’re a perfect fit.”
And finally, if your reaction to learning about abuse is to grab your baseball bat and commit a crime, don’t expect to be anyone’s favored confidant. They have a problem. If they tell you, they will have two problems — a shitty partner and a friend who’s going to end up in jail. So, why would they tell you?
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tcheasdfjkl said:
@osberend
Yes, that’s why the drugging thing is an analogy rather than the same exact thing.
For a closer example, consider addiction. If someone is addicted to a dangerous substance, the choice that will make them happiest in the long term is probably to quit using that substance, but that’s really hard to do. Deciding whether to use at any given time is a choice, to be sure, but when it’s really hard to make the correct choice, I don’t think it’s okay to blame addicts for being too “weak” to quit. And it’s certainly not useful to keep telling them they should quit – you’re not making it any easier for them, you’re just getting on their nerves.
I’m saying that compassion for people in bad situations requires letting go of the incredulousness of “why would they keep making this bad choice” because if being in a certain situation predictably causes people to keep making bad choices, the bad situation is akin to drugs in messing with their ability to make good choices, and you just can’t expect them to make the same choices as someone who is not in that situation.
Yes? It probably wouldn’t be if you left out the “stupid” part, but as stated it clearly is? Lots of people don’t have the self-confidence to not feel ashamed and hurt if their actions are called stupid – especially, as Nita points out, people whose self-confidence is already being systematically lowered by abuse!!
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osberend said:
@Nita:
That might be true, but doesn’t seem relevant to my point; I’m not suggesting “determinedly shaming” people; I’m simply suggesting starting with a recognition that stupid choices are, in fact, stupid choices. Even if, for the sake of argument, it’s not productive to say that to the person making them, it’s still a correct observation, and it shouldn’t be taboo to make it when discussing the situation in general.
Do you have a citation for the very strong claim that you seem to be implicitly endorsing? Because “people have a choice whether to accept what they’re told, but sometimes one of those choices is a lot easier than the other, and people often take the path of least resistance, even when they clearly shouldn’t” is, IMO, a far weaker claim than “you can literally force an adolescent or adult to believe something, without their having any say in the matter.”
Then 90% of people in that situation are in urgent need of remedial sentence-parsing instruction. Granted, I’m not convinced that that isn’t true of a solid majority at least of people generally.
But really, that’s beside the point. Words have meanings, even if the people hearing them pattern-match them to something ridiculous. Just because someone feels ashamed upon hearing a statement doesn’t mean that that statement itself constitutes shaming.
It’s not “lowering the status” of being a victim to acknowledge reality, it’s merely refusing to artificially raise it.
That’s a rather misleading summary. I’m not going to go out and break someone’s limbs as a reaction to simply hearing that they’re abusing someone I care about; I knew that he was abusive to some extent, that’s why I said “I wish to the gods that I’d known about the extent of what the perp was doing it while it was still happening. [emphasis added]”
But there are limits.
Also, I’m not sure I buy your “they’re going to have two problems” argument. If problem 1 is a “boyfriend” who beats, burns, and rapes you, and now all of his limbs are broken . . . that sure sounds like a solved problem to me.
@tcheasdfjkl:
Agreed.
I’m not so sure I agree with this part, though. (I do think that “weak” is probably not the best framing of the problem, but I think that particular bit of terminology is tangential to your main point.) Certainly, we can agree that using is a stupid choice, even if it’s a highly predictable one, right?
Well, this is complicated. It’s certainly true that just hassling people is rarely helpful. But it’s also true that saying “cut the bullshit, you’re rationalizing; you know what you have to do, so do it” can be a useful response to certain types of crap, at least from certain people.
I say that as someone who has unhealthy behavioral patterns that have a more than passing resemblance to substance addiction, by the way. Nagging isn’t helpful, but neither is making excuses, or failing to gonad up and say “That’s a load of crap, and if you’re being honest with yourself, you know it,” when that’s actually the case.
Where did I say that? There are parts of victim psychology that are alien to me, but in broad strokes at least, I get why people take the easy way out, even if it hurts them more in the end. But you can understand why someone’s making a bad choice, and still recognize that they are in fact making a bad choice, and they ought to make a different one.
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Nita said:
@osberend
The purpose of communication is to cause the other person to have certain thoughts. If the words you are using reliably cause different thoughts, then you are using the wrong words. No matter what the dictionary says.
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Nita said:
@ osberend
You can’t “force” an arbitrary person to believe an arbitrary statement, but you can shape the beliefs of someone who already trusts you (e.g., a family member or an intimate partner) in certain directions.
Most people already have a bit of self-doubt and negative thoughts lurking at the back of their minds, so you only have to subtly confirm them at the right moments.
My partner’s actions and words have caused me to change some beliefs about myself (for the better). In some sense, he “made” me believe these things — and if he had acted differently, perhaps I would believe some other things now.
Human interaction (especially in a relationship) mostly does not work like this:
A: I claim that X. Do you choose to accept or decline this claim?
B: I choose to accept this claim.
*claim X is added to B’s set of beliefs*
It’s more like this:
A: *does something*
B: *thinks/feels, “Huh, A is acting as if X. I suppose X might be true, then?”*
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osberend said:
@Nita:
But — and this perhaps comes back to the heart of our disagreement — I contend that that’s not actually a thing that one can reliably do. What one can do is encode information in accordance with the protocol defined by the rules of grammar and meanings of words in a given language. If one does that correctly, the responsibility for correct decoding lies with the recipient.
I’m fairly prescriptivist, but I don’t actually think that’s the heart of our dispute. My fundamental contention is this: If:
A given person P, if they were asked “how do I express assertion A in language L?” (to avoid circularity, assume (since this is a counter-factual anyway) that A is telepathically transmitted directly into their brain in a language-independent fashion) would reply “With sentence S,” and
P, when presented with sentence S by person Q (who intends to communicate A), interprets it as communicating Assertion B (whether in addition to A or in place of it, either way), despite the fact that
A does not imply B,
Then P is fucking up, and Q is not.
This hardly strikes me as unreasonable. But it seems to me like your position is a rejection of it. If so, please explain how P’s behavior is reasonable. If not, then what language would you suggest to communicate the concept present in a literal reading of “this thing you’re doing is stupid, and is predictably going to result in you keeping getting hurt.”
I suppose another way of putting my position is this: If a reasonable person would agree that the “literal meaning” of S is A, then stating S in order to communicate A (possibly with a prefatory statement about intending literal meanings) is entirely reasonable, and responding to S in those circumstances as communicating something apart from or beyond A is not.
Whether “literal meaning” exactly corresponds to “dictionary definition” is less important than the basic principle (although I do happen to think that it’s extremely desirable as well).
If they cooperate, absolutely. And given that they trust you, that cooperation is likely. But it’s still not outside their control.
Also, there’s the question of whether their trusting you in the first place is stupid. In many, though by no means all, abusive relationships, the answer is yes.
This seems to me to be a misunderstanding of my position at best, and a strawman at worst.
Allow me to elaborate that (in the context of a false claim X and an abusive relationship), in two ways:
A: *does something*
B: “Huh, A is acting as if X.”
B: *has the option to consider that the explanation might be that A is mistaken, irrational, or just plain full of shit. Does not do this*
B: “I suppose X might be true, then?”
B: *has the option to analyze whether X is in fact true, conclude that it is clearly false, and reject it. Does not do this*
B: *treats “X might be true” as “X is true”*
Those sure were some bad decisions that B just made, huh? Alternatively:
A: *does something*
B: “Huh, A is acting as if X.”
B: “So either X is true, A incorrectly believes that X is true, or A is behaving as if X is true despite not believing that.”
B: “Okay, so is X true?”
B: *analyzes the evidence available to them*
B: “Okay, so X is false. So why is A behaving as if it’s true?”
B: *further analysis whose details depend on exactly what X is*
B: “Wow, A is an abusive shithead! Why am I in a relationship with them, again!?”
Hey, look, better decisions!
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tcheasdfjkl said:
@osberend
To clarify, I think we agree here:
1. In most situations where one is being abused and has the agency to leave, it is better to leave than not to. (Note: I say “most” because leaving can also be dangerous, as abusers often escalate their violence in this situation; which is why abuse victims sometimes plan for a long time before leaving so they can leave more safely by basically disappearing.)
2. It is often (usually? nearly always?) counterproductive to tell a victim of abuse who has not left that they are making a stupid choice.
I think a large part of our disagreement is just about the meaning of “stupid”. To me – and it seems also to Nita – the meaning of “stupid” includes judgmentalness. I wouldn’t use this word unless I meant to convey that some choice/policy is obviously wrong and the person responsible is possibly being willfully obtuse when they don’t fix it, and I’d be frustrated as I said it. (Relatedly, I don’t use this word to describe people.) This is at odds with compassion.
If we went through your exercise with telepathy and you transmitted to me what you mean by saying “that is a stupid choice and you should stop making it”, and your transmission did not contain a feeling of shaming and judgmentalness, I would probably phrase it as something like “the choice you are making is harmful to you, and you would be better off if you made a different choice”. That strikes me as true and neutral. Then if I wanted to communicate this to a friend who is currently being abused, I would couch it in additional kindness while reiterating my respect for their agency.
I believe that most people use “stupid” the way I do (though I don’t have any more concrete evidence than my general impression of the word – but this is usually roughly sufficient). So I think this should just never be said of people in bad situations which, again, predictably ruin people’s ability to make good judgments.
For yet another analogy (I think I’m getting progressively closer to the correct one), consider alcohol. Alcohol does not uniformly make people fall asleep the way some drugs do, but it does predictably make people worse at doing stuff. In particular, while I don’t experience this effect myself, apparently many people make bad decisions when drunk. Most of the time people decide whether and how much to drink, so they still have responsibility for their actions when drunk. I contend that being abused is like being force-fed alcohol, except it’s alcohol somehow specially formulated to make you distrust yourself and trust your abuser. Sure, it’s technically possible to make good choices when you’re drunk, but it’s really hard, in a different way from the way it’s really hard to quit a substance you’re addicted to.
Anyway I’m not sure if we really disagree on much beyond this; we seem to have mostly a difference in emphasis, but it’s enough of a difference that it rather frustrates me. I would say that I should stop arguing, except it’s kind of fun?
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Nita said:
@ osberend
I would suggest something like, “I’m worried about you. What has been happening does not look normal to me. [examples go here] I think you need to get out. But, no matter you decide to do, please let me know if you ever need anything, because I care about you.”
Obviously, it’s not guaranteed to work. Nothing is. But it’s much harder, even for a mind stuck in unhealthy patterns of thought, to misinterpret this as “you suck and you deserve to suffer”.
(The more general part of my reply kind of turned into half-an-essay, so I’ll post it on Tumblr or something after it grows into a full essay.)
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liskantope said:
Guess I’ll venture into the hornet’s nest and say that, although I like this essay better than most of what I’ve read on the topic of victim-blaming and think it has some good arguments, I feel like it misses a lot of the point.
First of all, and most importantly, there’s a major fundamental difference between being “not at fault” and “should not change their behavior”. In my opinion, a confusion between these two notions forms the crux of the whole debate on victim-blaming.
And secondly, I agree that plenty of people, especially older, more experienced people, have a good idea of the risks involved with various activities and are making perfectly valid choices based on expected outcomes, even if those choices occasionally have horrific results. But my impression is that a lot of the well-meant advice that gets attacked as victim-blaming is aimed towards those who might not be particularly aware of certain risks. For instance, I’m not sure how many college freshmen clearly understand the dangers of drinking heavily at parties full of people they don’t know.
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liskantope said:
Wow, when I set out to write the above comment, there were no comments under this blog post. When I submitted it some 15 minutes later, it’s the 7th one down. Guess this goes to show what a hot-button topic rape-victim-blaming is…
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Anonymous said:
I once read someone asking: We tell rape victims they’re free to report the rape or not as they choose, and that having done no wrong they have incurred no obligation. We also tell witnesses of rape that they must testify, otherwise they’re letting a rapist go free. Is this contradictory?
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Evan Þ said:
I would think a given rape victim is more likely to have complicated emotional turmoil surrounding the question of testifying than a given witness.
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taradinoc said:
Betting $50 on a coin toss to win $1000 is only a good bet if you can actually bear to lose it. If losing the $50 means you won’t be able to pay rent, you probably shouldn’t risk it.
liskantope made the excellent point above that “not at fault” is not at all the same thing as “should not change their behavior”. Sometimes it’s good to change your behavior in order to stay out of situations where, due to circumstances that aren’t your fault, a bad outcome could occur. In fact, most guidance on crime prevention and travel safety includes some element of that: rape stands out as possibly the only subject where it’s taboo to talk about things people can do to reduce their risk of becoming a victim.
On the other hand, if you want to look at this purely in terms of tradeoffs, then you have to accept that bad outcomes may occur. If you bet on that coin toss, you know there’s a good chance you’ll lose. The fact that you took a calculated risk on a good bet might earn you a high-five from your fellow gamblers, but it won’t earn any more sympathy from your landlord.
Likewise, if someone takes a calculated risk to stumble drunk through a dark alley in East Sex Offender Heights, knowing that they might get raped, and then they do… wouldn’t/shouldn’t they get a different response when telling the story than someone else who “took every precaution”?
Finally, there’s another tradeoff involved: the one anti-rape activists have to make in deciding how to achieve their goals. If convincing rapists not to rape is sufficiently harder than convincing freshmen not to drink with strangers, then the activists will find it most effective to focus on alcohol, and shaming them as victim-blamers will be counterproductive.
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Patrick said:
“rape stands out as possibly the only subject where it’s taboo to talk about things people can do to reduce their risk of becoming a victim.”
Its not REALLY taboo. Literally every feminist I’ve ever encountered who, say, complains about university orientation or campus self defense courses discussing sexual assault has also posted on their blogs about their “rape schedule.” Its just identity politics. When WE talk about risk reduction, we’re feminists commiserating on the need to educate young women on how to navigate Our Patriarchal Society; when YOU do it its because you’re a capitalist running dog lackey; and we can tell the difference because of Reasons. Good reasons. The best reasons. And if you say otherwise, well, this one time we heard someone totally victim blame an actual rape victim right to her face for real, so we’ll just say you’re defending that.
This is kind of an issue for me because I was literally raised by a bunch of feminists born in the 50s who now teach those courses, volunteer at women’s shelters, and teach self defense classes. And I was going to law school right when it became trendy to separate oneself from older uncool feminists by attacking them for victim blaming on the grounds that they publicly discussed rape avoidance strategies. So I read more than a few of the hit pieces on this issue from back in 2005 or so. It was the point that emotionally separated me from the feminist label. The dis-ingenuity was so plain that I had to accept that at least a reasonable portion of the “cool” “trendy” type of feminism was much more interested in patting itself on the back for caring about things than actually getting anything done.
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liskantope said:
Taradinoc and Patrick are both right here, in that in particular subcultures it’s okay to complain about what you have to do to avoid rape but not okay to advise someone else on what they should do to avoid it, whereas it’s okay to advise someone on how to avoid almost any other type of crime. I imagine that in other subcultures not dominated by young, socially liberal people, this is not so much the case, but I wouldn’t know.
When I got my bike stolen, the first thing out of everyone’s mouth (after a requisite expression of sympathy, or sometimes even before it) was a question about whether I locked it up properly, followed by advice on how to be wiser in the future. This is including an outspokenly feminist friend who participates in Carry That Weight type activism.
I definitely relate to this, having also been brought up by feminists born in the 50’s and then being taken aback by the contrasting flavor of feminism I saw in college. I remember the event which first gave me serious reservations about feminism-as-practiced-by-my-generation, rather than just “of course I’m completely with the causes of my feminist peers, even if I think they state things unreasonably from time to time”. When I was in college (this was not long after 2005), after a series of campus sexual assaults and rapes were reported in the news, an editorial appeared in the college newspaper giving a list of tips on how to avoid sexual assault and rape. This was mostly common-sense stuff, like don’t walk in certain places alone at night, be careful about accepting drinks from people you don’t know, etc., but as I’ve pointed out in a comment elsewhere, these things may not be obvious to all college students and especially incoming freshmen might not have given them much thought. The editorial ended by saying something like, “Above all, remember that whatever happens, it’s not your fault.” I was completely shocked at seeing a nasty letter to the editor the next day from a feminist organization (don’t remember which one) which absolutely blasted the editorial for blaming rape victims for rape and being part of the problem and so on. At the time, I was incredibly frustrated: it felt to me that they were more interested in moral grandstanding than actually trying to concretely help people, and moreover were explicitly pushing away the people who actually were trying to provide some help. Of course, now I wouldn’t be surprised to see this kind of reaction, but at the time it was pretty new to me.
Since then, I’ve come to believe that this is just one instantiation of a much broader fallacy which affects discourse on a wide variety of issues as well as personal drama: that of confusing moral blameworthiness with “shouldn’t make that choice because all else being equal, it will lead to a worse expected outcome”. This is related to “is-versus-ought”, and important for what I call “multivariate utilitarianism” which I’ve expanded upon in a WordPress post. I no longer believe the anti-victim-blaming rhetoric is really so much a problem of useless moral grandstanding as a genuine confusion of this type. (The same goes for actual victim-blaming rhetoric as well!)
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liskantope said:
I want to add to my reply above that after a while, another explanation occurred to me for attitudes like the one exhibited by the feminist organization against the college paper in my story above. Victim-blaming for rape actually does exist in some subcultures, at least in some alt-right circles and probably even a lot of Red Tribe areas. I’ve virtually never witnessed it firsthand, but it definitely does exist. (The closest I’ve come to witnessing it was overhearing a guy who worked in my old building, one of the only Red-Tribey people I ever knew while I was a graduate student, who was complaining about women who go out dressed “provocatively” and then complain about unwanted attention.) Some college feminists may have grown up exposed to these subcultures, and even those who haven’t have likely been informed of that attitude by other feminists. And so their misinterpretation of well-intentioned advice may just be a result of knee-jerk pattern-matching.
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Immanentizing Eschatons said:
But isn’t this basically just saying, “what if the expected value is negative”, where what Ozy is saying is “it’s not”.
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taradinoc said:
No. The expected value in Ozy’s scenario is clearly positive, but EV isn’t the only thing that matters. If losing $50 half the time will render you homeless, it doesn’t matter if you’ll win $1000 the other half of the time; you can’t afford the risk, and if you tell your landlord “but I might’ve won!”, you’re going to get victim-blamed.
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Immanentizing Eschatons said:
That’s a positive expected value of *money*, but not *utility*
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taradinoc said:
Well, whether the utility cost of losing the bet is more or less than the payoff of winning, the point is you accept that potential cost when you place the bet. Taking a calculated risk is not very compatible with claiming victim status and gaining sympathy when you get the bad outcome.
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Immanentizing Eschatons said:
Why not though? Everything is a risk, even if you don’t stop to calculate it. And I don’t see why we shouldn’t have sympathy for someone even *if* they did something completely stupid.
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taradinoc said:
Some sympathy, sure, but it’ll be less than if they were blindsided.
If my friend showed up to dinner, shaking with fear and adrenaline after having been mugged to the tune of $50, I’d probably react with a lot of sympathy.
If they showed up to dinner equally distraught because they lost $50 on a coin toss… well, I might be equally sympathetic to their immediate distress, but once they calmed down, the conversation would quickly turn to “So, um, didn’t you think this might happen? Was the risk worth it? Maybe gambling isn’t a good hobby for you.”
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liskantope said:
I’m sympathetic to a lot of what you say, but I don’t think I’m entirely on board with your version of the betting analogy. A better analogy might be betting $50 you can’t afford to lose on a chance of winning $1000 when this is the only feasible way you have to make money. Ozy seemed to be implying that things like socializing, experiencing romantic and/or sexual relationships, and leaving one’s house at night are very highly desirable to the point that most people sort of need to be able to do them. To completely avoid all risk of catastrophic things happening is basically to stay at home in bed all day, which may look at first glance like a lifestyle which is technically feasible but is not actually sustainable from a psychological point of view.
Also, I agree with your last paragraph in theory, but am not sure that it happens to be the case that anti-rape activism is best occupied entirely with advising potential victims and not with opening the eyes of potential perpetrators, especially in the context of a dangerous college drinking culture.
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taradinoc said:
Of course. Completely avoid all risk is one extreme, which I’ve never seen anyone seriously suggest.
I have, unfortunately, seen people pushing the opposite extreme, i.e. never go out of your way to avoid any risk of assault, because (they say) changing your behavior implies you’re at fault. I’ve even seen someone say that if you do anything to avoid being raped, that just means the rapist will attack someone else instead, and now that will be your fault. (It’s incredible how so many people are unable to distinguish between agency and moral blameworthiness.)
The answer isn’t to avoid all risk or avoid no risk. It’s to evaluate each case on its merits, and take reasonable action to minimize the risk of bad outcomes when possible instead of just accepting them because they’re not your fault. One can (and people do) argue about how much action to mitigate risk is “reasonable”, and over time the answers turn into social norms. Most people accept the risk of driving on the highway, but they mitigate it by wearing their seatbelts and driving at reasonable speeds; they accept the risk of keeping valuables in their home, but they lock the door when they leave.
In other words, there isn’t just one calculated risk in one of these situations — there’s a whole tree of them, and taking the risk at the top shouldn’t necessarily mean taking all the other risks that follow.
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The Freelancer said:
Lol “East Sex Offender Heights”. Truly not a laughing matter, but that made me chuckle. As a woman who runs a blog for rape victims, and is 100% against victim blaming, I agree with you.
I mean, I don’t think it’s up to women to live their life in fear as a hermit who never leaves their home, and I don’t think under any circumstances it is truly the woman who is to *blame* for the rape.
However, I do agree that taking precautions are in everyone’s obvious best interest. A man does not become a rapist because a woman gets drunk in a tight dress. But, not being the drunk woman in a tight dress may prevent you from being a target for that rapist.
And your point about activists is spot on. If we tell women not to drink, it’s a form of “victim blame”. But, if we tell men not to rape, it’s just accepted as the universal solution. I think there’s a wider, broader issue at play that unfortunately, neither feminists nor abusers would ever see eye-to-eye on.
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Ghatanathoah said:
This is a very good rejection of victim-blaming, but I don’t think it’s the True Rejection of most of the people who get outraged about victim blaming. Most people I’ve encountered who get very upset about victim blaming seem to have a very confused and toxic conception of blame that is based on confused virtue ethics. Most of the people who get upset when advice is conflated with victim-blaming tend to have a more consequentialist concept of blame.
To some people, pointing out things a person could have done to prevent a bad thing from happening carries with it a lot of connotations, including:
-This person is TO BLAME FOR WHAT HAPPENED.
-It is good that this bad thing happened to this person because they are TO BLAME FOR IT.
-No one is obligated to help this person because it is THEIR OWN FAULT.
-In fact, it might even be bad to help them since it is THEIR OWN FAULT
-This person should feel guilty for what happened to them because they are TO BLAME.
Other people have much more pragmatic and non-horrible conceptions of blame. They tend to have a more utilitarian conception of blame as setting up useful incentives.
The problem is that when a person with a horrible, toxic conception of blame comes across a person with a pragmatic conception of blame, they will infer all sorts of horrible things that the pragmatic person never intended to convey. If a pragmatic person mentions ways that they think other people could avoid bad stuff by changing their behavior, the horrible toxic blame person will hear them saying that those people are TO BLAME and that IT’s YOUR OWN FAULT, and NO ONE SHOULD HELP YOU BECAUSE YOU BROUGHT IT ON YOURSELF.
In particular, I think that the horrible toxic blame people tend to use blame as a way to give themselves and society permission to not help other people. When a more pragmatic person mentions ways people could avoid bad stuff, the toxic person will often assume they are saying we shouldn’t help victims.
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MugaSofer said:
This is a very good point, but I also think it is not the True Rejection of “victim blaming”.
The true rejection of victim-blaming is that people often insinuate that people who have been raped were promiscuous and Bad People and deserved to be raped, often based solely on the evidence that they were raped.
This is obviously bad, both because promiscuous people do not deserve to be raped, and because it suggests that avoiding rape is as easy as simply not being a Bad Person. And probably for a few other reasons, like the fact that it is presumably responsible for the strange leniency many people feel toward people who are firmly established to be rapists, the fact that it insults rape victims and makes it difficult for them to find recourse, etc.
Not everything that is called victim-blaming is this behavior, because humans.
But I’m pretty sure this is the core of the rejection, and a real phenomenon which is genuinely bad.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I think there are at least 4 distinct types of “victim blaming”-like behaviors.
1. People doing what you said, where the victim is genuinely blamed.
2. People engaging in hindsight bias, like Ozy describes
3. People trying to reassure themselves that they could never be raped by trying to identify ways they think they would have behaved differently than the victim (which is pretty douchey behavior, especially when done to the victim’s face)
4. People doing what I described, where people with sane conceptions of blame giving advice getting pattern-matched as 1s by people with more toxic conceptions of blame.
I don’t know what proportion of victim blaming is which, but I’d estimate that in modern upper-class liberal society 2 and 3 are probably the most common, followed by 4, with 1 being rarest, but still prevalent. In modern society as a whole 1 is probably more common than 4 and in more traditional societies 1 might be the most common.
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osberend said:
I’m not sure if you’re saying that virtue ethics as such is confused, or that (maximally vile) victim-blamers’ understanding of virtue ethics is confused. I initially assumed the former, and read that as yet another example of someone in the rationalist sphere contrasting “consequentialism” and “virtue ethics,” where the thing labeled as “virtue ethics” is actually an incoherent and/or evil mess that has little or nothing in common with any sort of remotely sane approach to virtue ethics. But now on re-reading, I’m not sure.
In any event, the “toxic conception of blame” you’re describing strikes me as closer to dessert-ethicist (hence, non-utilitarian) consequentialism than to true virtue ethics — “if you could have done something that would have avoided this bad outcome, you should have” is a lot more consequentialist than virtue ethicist, IMO.
I’m separately a little confused by your continuing to use the term “blame” for what I would term something like “causal responsibility,” when discussing a more sensible attitude. Is this just a case of my making distinctions that (perfect) utilitarians don’t?
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Ghatanathoah said:
I am saying that the understanding of virtue ethics possessed by the people who get mad about victim blaming (and the vilest victim-blamers) is confused. You might be right that “dessert ethicist” is a more accurate way to describe the idea I was grasping towards than “confused virtue ethics.” I will use it from now on.
I am arguing that people with “confused dessert ethics,” have great difficulty recognizing any distinction between causal responsibility and blame. They see little difference between assigning causal responsibility and assigning blame. You can see this in the way they react to victim blaming, but it’s visible elsewhere too. For instance I’ve read numerous liberal defenses of taxation that basically argue that because other factors than you have some causal responsibility for you making money; you don’t deserve any of your money and the government can tax as much of it as they want.
To someone with less confused utilitarian ethics (or any other type of less confused ethics for that matter) blame and causal responsibility are separate concepts, and someone can be causally responsible for something without being to blame for it.
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Murphy said:
I get the impression that there’s a certain element of Worst Thing In The Worlding being directed at thing perceived as victim blaming that doesn’t get applied to anything else with a cost-benefit.
——————————-
You walk into an IT security meeting at a company. They announce that because most security measures have some costs and disadvantages they’re going to embrace openness. As such they’re going to stop bothering to create new accounts. (cost benefit), they’re going to just give the admin username and password to anyone who needs access to anything whether it’s internal or external. To save time at the login screen they’re gonna stop bothering with passwords. etc etc.
You express that perhaps this isn’t a great plan but get boo’ed as a “hacker apologist” and told to shut up.
At the meeting someone hands around a leaflet “how to stop hacking attacks”, the leaflet is a long list of things like “don’t hack into peoples servers”,”don’t install keyloggers on others peoples machines”, “don’t steal bank longin info from other people”.
yes… indeed. If everyone followed those rules there would indeed be no hacking.
2 weeks later you meet some of them and it turns out that the companies bank accounts have been emptied and their servers are all trashed.
Do you express that perhaps their earlier choices that you mentioned before might have had something to do with their empty bank account? does that make you a bad person?
Are you justified feeling less sympathy for these guys than for another company which got hacked but tried reasonably hard to be secure?
——————————-
The next day you’re walking through a crummy neighborhood and outside a store there’s a shiny new Ferrari parked at the curb with it’s windows open and the key in the ignition.
You see the driver inside and ask him if he knows that he’s left the keys in the ignition and the windows open outside.
He berates you for supporting “auto theft culture” and hands you a leaflet titled “How to prevent auto theft” listing many ways to prevent auto theft including “don’t steal peoples cars”,”don’t take peoples cars without getting their permission” etc etc
you can’t fault it, if everyone followed those rules his car would be totally safe.
The next week you see a news report that his car has been stolen.
Is your reaction “no shit” or “oh that poor guy”? Does the former make you a bad person?
——————————-
The person sitting at the desk next to you gets visibly excited, you ask them what’s up and they say “I’m gonna be rich!” and show you an email they’ve just received “hello, I am the former prince of Nigeria”
You tell them it’s an obvious scam and they berate you for “trying to control what they do with their money” and call you a “scam enabler”
They give you a leaflet titled “how to prevent financial fraud” listing things like “don’t defaud people” “don’t empty peoples bank accounts” “don’t commit mail fraud”…
Can’t fault it. if everyone followed all the rules on it then there would be no problem with financial fraud.
Later you hear the person person is planning a trip to meet their nigerian prince for the “last few bits of paperwork” to claim their money.
A while after that you meet their daughter who’s raising money. Their family can’t make the ransom demand and you never see them again.
Are you a bad person for being unwilling to pony up cash to try to meet the ransom or suggesting that perhaps there was an earlier stage in the process where he had some responsibility for the outcomes?
——————————-
Someone you know declares that they’re planning to go visit fallujah back at the height of the fighting. They want to see the sights….
You get the idea
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Patrick said:
The standard answer is to claim that, as a purely empirical matter, our society is awash in the conviction that rape victims are all irresponsible people who deserve to have been raped because of the irresponsible and probably sexually immoral things they did. As such, if someone says that there are important safety reasons why women shouldn’t drink themselves to unconsciousness in the company of frat boys they’ve never met before, it’s fair to infer that either their motivation for saying so is slut shaming and victim blaming, or, at the very least, they are blameworthy for not understanding that the people who hear then say that will interpret it as agreement with their slut shaming, victim blaming ways. And since people who hold this belief also believe that the slit shaming and victim blaming makes said frat boys feel entitled to rape any unconscious women they come across, because they assume that they’ve just met one of those irresponsible women who deserve to be raped that they’ve heard so much about.
Meanwhile they’ll argue that no analogous beliefs pervade our culture with respect to auto theft, data security, etc.
A lot rides on the accuracy of our empirical beliefs.
If people who feel the way I described above are correct in full, then the fact that I don’t believe them and occasionally say so makes me complicit in an unnecessarily elevated level of rape and sexual assault.
If they’re not correct, they’re materially indistinguishable from a hate group. I mean that literally- you can swap out the direct objects and turn my first paragraph into a summary of racist tirade that would fit right in on any hate groups website.
A whole lot rides on the accuracy of our beliefs.
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Murphy said:
I’d guess that the empirical reality of how tractable the rapists are would also come into it.
In a world where all anyone needs is a yearly “rape is not ok” seminar to prevent them from committing rape then it would be pretty much insane to not have such seminars.
On the other hand if you are unlikely to actually prevent rapes by showing powerpoint slides to potential rapists then you run into the same problem you do with eastern european hackers and nigerian princes, it’s both problematic and not practical to track them down in advance and make them not exist, they’re unlikely to care much about your culture… which leaves you with few options other treating them as an environmental hazard like rock falls and bears.
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Benjamin Arthur Schwab said:
“The standard answer is to claim that, as a purely empirical matter, our society is awash in the conviction that rape victims are all irresponsible people who deserve to have been raped because of the irresponsible and probably sexually immoral things they did. …
Meanwhile they’ll argue that no analogous beliefs pervade our culture with respect to auto theft, data security, etc.”
Well… there is the belief that impoverished people deserve their poverty. This belief is hardly universal but it does exist noticeably in US culture.
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Eric L said:
Telling people to use strong passwords while not telling them not to hack is hack culture.
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Immanentizing Eschatons said:
You would not be wrong to give people advice in these scenarios, but it *would* be wrong to have less sympathy. You are not a bad person for not wanting to raise ransom money for the same reason not donating everything you own to effective altruism doesn’t make you a bad person, and one could make an argument that paying ransoms incentivises kidnappers or whatever, but actually i *would* consider being less willing to help someone just because they did something stupid to cause the problem in of itself to be pretty morally terrible.
But the point is really that all these scenarios are offering reasonable advice while the typical rape advice is useless because people are already aware of the risk and have judged the risks worth it- if anything I suspect people probably
overestimate the risk.
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jossedley said:
Thinking some more, I think there are a number of categories that might be construed as victim blaming. To make matters more complex, there’s some overlap, and which category a given instance falls into depends somewhat on intention, and therefore on how much charity we want to extend to the speaker.
1) Pure victim blaming of a specific individual: I think we all agree that if our response to finding out a coworker has lung cancer is to tell her “Well, it’s your own fault for smoking so much,” then we are jerks.
Presumably, we can also agree that people who tell a rape victim that he had it coming are also jerks.
2) Cautionary tales: This is a little trickier. If the newspaper story about an elderly couple who fell for an internet scam points out some mistakes they made and has a statement from some LEO saying “It’s important for people to remember never to give out their credit card information when . . .”, I think most people don’t have a problem, even if it does make the story subjects seem a little more naive.
3) Search for the truth: When an accusation is leveled against a specific person or institution, the public has an interest in knowing whether it’s true. So pointing out that the “Jackie” story has inconsistencies is relevant when specific frats or the Greek system as a whole are being vandalized, disciplined, etc. Similarly, there’s a shame campaign against the guy accused by the Columbia mattress artist, so you can argue whether pointing out their facebook exchanges is blaming or just trying to figure out what happened.
4) Generalized warnings: At the far side is generalized advice that doesn’t relate to any specific survivor, but might make some people feel that they did something wrong. (“Remember to lock up your bike”, “Don’t leave valuables visible in your car,” etc.)
As I said, I think almost everyone would agree that #1 is wrong, and I think most people would agree that when dealing with most crimes, 2-4 are OK. (Although 2 might require some sensitivity).
I guess the underlying question is whether rape is so intimate, and so tied up with social shaming, that we should have special rules for 2-4. That’s a good discussion to have.
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Evan Þ said:
Actually, I wouldn’t always agree with #1. If I tell someone he needs to lock up your bike or it might get stolen, he says, “Well, using a lock is just such a bother…” and then a week later his bike gets stolen and he comes to me looking for pity – I don’t have any problem with saying he should’ve locked it up in the first place.
On the other hand, your lung cancer example does feel different to me, and I’m not totally sure why. Is it because the pain of lung cancer is so much worse than the one-time cost of replacing a stolen bike? Is it because giving up smoking is so much more of a life change than locking up your bike (and still leaves you with a heightened risk from your previous days of smoking)? I’m not sure, but both these distinctions are probably relevant to the question you’ve correctly called out.
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multicoastal said:
I like your example – and of course you are right that not having an intimate partner is the #1 thing that one can do to minimize one’s likelihood of being raped (and being spousally abused, and a whole bunch of other things). It seems that just like rape is the Worst Thing in the World, and therefore something that people can be judged for not doing Everything Possible to avoid, having a partner is the Best Thing in the World and therefore something that people should obviously risk anything to have. So they sort of cancel each other out. I am like you a newleywed (I got married a week before you did) and having a partner feels pretty wonderful right now, but it’s not the only good or important thing in my life, and it’s not the only thing worth taking risks for.
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Lurker said:
Risk reduction is probably logarithmic. Good choices when starting to date, and early departures at first signs of problems, would probably catch the first 75%. Celibacy would catch the remaining 25% but I”d settle for the first part right now, wouldn’t you?
The anti-victim-blaming crowd loves to focus on the inefficient 25% with arguments liek “celibacy and abstinence” but the pro-warning crowd prefers to focus on the efficient 75% with arguments like “slower” I’m in the second group.
Logarithmic benefits? Yes.
For example, reducing risk of rapes from alcohol does NOT require “never have a beer.” The biggest benefits start at “don’t get falling down drunk in an unknown bar by yourself” and they degrade down. The risk of having one beer at Applebees with a friend, or having two beers in your house with your roommate, are pretty minimal. Sadly not close to zero, but a shitload smaller.
I do not think you’re correct. Officially, either they are not informed at all because Victim Blaming, or they are informed in the “abstain” sense which is worthless. And I don’t know if ‘grapevine’ is informed enough.
But, sometimes they DO make a bad decision. And often that seems to be because they are not thinking about the actual risk, which may be because they’re encouraged not to consider it by the No Victim Blaming folks. Many of those folks are young, and they need it shown to them again and again.
You say you walk at 2AM because you’ve decided specifically that the risk, which you have considered, is worth it. OK: your call. You know your neighborhood better than we do and I bet you consider it every time you leave, because you seem that kind of person. (Or maybe you put an unreasonably high value on Snickers although you know you’re in real danger. I hope not.)
But when Cathy Collegegirl decides to preload with a juice glass full of vodka before walking to an unknown frat party, I’d bet you $20 that she didn’t actually stop to think about the risk*. Or that she properly evaluated the difference between “two drinks and buzz” and “eight beers.”
If Cathy thought about it, she’d do it a lot less.
*And even if I lost, it’s still a good bet.
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breadomlette said:
girl’s are not a toy….stop playing with her…change your mentality, and save the whole humanity….
Read my blog on girl’s character….
https://breadomlette.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/why-people-can-only-raise-a-finger-to-girls-character/
https://breadomlette.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/sochne-waali-baat-hai/
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thepaisleyphoenix said:
Congratulations. This moved away from victim-blaming to survivor-shaming. As a person who has lived through rape and made a life regardless, I say think before you speak or type. My survival has allowed to me to help raise boys who are very aware of “no means NO!” and if they even look hesitant, stop and verify first. Not that I’ve given details, but they are aware these things don’t just happen “to other people.” They happen because someone made a choice to take away someone else’s choice. My survival has provided me instincts to use to keep my loved ones away from predators.
Do you shame a parent who has survived their child’s passing? That was a choice taken from them, and I’m sure they would all have chosen to die rather than survive that agony. Do you shame a soldier who is the only survivor of their unit? They would have chosen death over survival. Do you shame a cancer survivor? They weren’t given a choice and their own body attacked them. There was no other person to blame or prosecute.
No. In none of these or many other situations would you dare utter the words “survivor euthanasia” or even infer they should have chosen that time-machine of pre-emptive death rather than surviving.
And yet, as much as some have claimed death would be preferable to survival, nobody looks at someone who either has, or has tried and failed, to commit suicide as “understandable,” “reasonable” or “doing the right thing.” Why? Because it’s death. You can’t overcome death and come back swinging or with a frakkin lesson to impart. Like putting any kind of shame on surviving having your choice stolen for a short time is the same thing as putting blame on that person for ever having had their choice stolen at all.
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beanthinkin said:
https://beantheredonethat94.wordpress.com this is my piece on consent. I’d love for you to take a look. This was a super interesting read and I’d love for you to check mine out
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She-Ra said:
Thank you for writing this. I appreciate your thoughts and perspective.
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