Victim blaming

Victim blaming is holding the victim of a crime responsible for that crime. Starting in the 1970s, the term was commonly used in the United States. It was mainly used in connection with trials for rape, as well those with a racist background.^[1]

In 1947 Theodor W. Adorno defined what would be later called "blaming the victim," as "one of the most sinister features of the Fascist character".^[2][3] Shortly after, Adorno and three other professors at the University of California, Berkeley created their influential and highly debated F-scale (F for fascist), published in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which included among the fascist traits of the scale the "contempt for everything discriminated against or weak."^[4] A common example of victim blaming is the "asking for it" idiom, e.g. "she was asking for it" said of a victim of violence or sexual assault.^[5]

1. ↑ McCaul, Kevin D.; Veltum, Lois G.; Boyechko, Vivian; Crawford, Jacqueline J. (January 1990). "Understanding Attributions of Victim Blame for Rape: Sex, Violence, and Foreseeability". Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 20 (1): 1–26. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1990.tb00375.x.
2. ↑ Adorno, TW (1947) Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler in Kenyon Review Vol.ix (1), p. 158
3. ↑ James Martin Harding (1997) Adorno and "A writing of the ruins": essays on modern aesthetics and Anglo-American literature and culture, p.143 quotation: "The mechanisms of this ideological affinity between Baraka and Wagner can be seen in a short critique of Wagner that Adorno wrote directly after the Second World War—at a time when Adorno was perhaps his most direct in singling out the proto-fascist tendencies in Wagner's corpus and character. Adorno criticizes Wagner's having bated his conductor Herman Levi so that he would seem to bear the responsibility for Wagner's subsequent insulting dismissal of him. This, for Adorno, is a classic example of blaming the victim. The anti-Semitic sub-text to the dismissal, viz., that as a Jew Levi supposedly desired and brought the dismissal upon himself, "bears witness to the existence of one of the most sinister features of the Fascist character even in Wagner's time: the paranoid tendency of projecting upon others one's own violent aggressiveness and then indicting, on the basis of this projection, those whom one endows with pernicious qualities" (Adorno "Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler" 158)."
4. ↑ Adorno and the political By Espen Hammer p.63
5. ↑ Nicky Ali Jackson (22 February 2007). Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence. Taylor & Francis. pp. 715–. ISBN 978-0-203-94221-5. Retrieved 11 May 2013.