Victim Blaming?

[Arkilogue]

There is a difference between being at fault and being responsible (in your own actions). There is also a difference between giving advice for foresight, and giving advice for hindsight.

A rape victim is never at fault for being raped, because the act of being raped isn't their own. A potential rape victim (and let's face it, that includes everyone) can do some responsible things to try and avoid becoming a rape victim. Sometimes those responsible things will work, sometimes they won't, because there is no way to avoid being raped with a 100% certainty. Staying in groups of friends, drinking responsibly, pre-booking taxis, etc. are all examples of responsible things that can minimize the chances of being raped.

This advice is good to use as foresight. That is, if someone is going out to a party, it's reasonable to tell them "you should do x, y, z and stay safe". However, this advice is not any good (or any use) in hindsight. If said person gets raped at the party, it's not ever reasonable, or indeed ever polite, to tell them "well you should have done x, y, z and you wouldn't have been raped". The simple reason being, that neither x, y, or z are guarantees that someone will not be raped.

Great post and thank you for demonstrating skillful means!

Here's something I'd been meaning to post of similar opinion and skill.
https://www.quora.com/Can-a-rape-victim-...ists-fault

Thomas Dalton
Written Mar 2, 2014
"Responsible" and "fault" are complicated words. In the real world, outcomes are the result of many actions and decisions by many people often far removed from what ended up happening. If one tiny thing had been different, the outcome could have been completely different.

For example, if a barman several miles away had refused to serve someone then they wouldn't have got drunk and then tried to drive home causing an accident that resulted in the bus being late forcing the victim to walk home in the dark right past where the rapist was waiting. Is that barman "responsible" for the rape? In a sense, yes - if he had acted differently the rape wouldn't have happened. That's not a particularly useful sense of responsibility, though.

So where do we draw the line? The only person with ultimate control over whether the rape took place is the rapist. There are other people with some smaller but significant degree of control and who could reasonably foreseen the consequences of their actions (that's what absolves the barman - he couldn't have foreseen such a chain of events), though, who could potentially be assigned some responsibility. That includes the victim.

Did they walk down a dark alley that they could have avoided knowing perfectly well that they were taking a risk? Then they do have some responsibility. Everyone has to take some responsibility for their own safety. If you take risks, then you have some responsibility for the consequences.

That someone else has some responsibility does not diminish the responsibility of the rapist, though. Responsibility isn't a finite thing that gets shared out. Each person is responsible for their own actions, independently of what everyone else is doing. The rapist is 100% at fault for the fact that he committed a rape. He may not have had the opportunity had it not been for the actions of others, but that doesn't change the fact that when he committed the act it was 100% his decision.