Never Blame the Victim

It is not at all uncommon for someone to arrive at a scene or brutality or injustice and, with a sympathetic murmur or heroic flourish, attack the victim. It happens all the time. - Renata Adler

When we are dissatisfied or frustrated it is easy to blame someone or something else for our unhappiness and misery. Sometimes the chosen scapegoat may have very little or nothing to do with our original frustration, yet having a scapegoat - our boss, a friend, a relative, anyone - to blame for our problems makes somehow our negative feelings less unexplainable. We feel that we 'know' whom to blame.

Blaming others is very common, everyone does it sometimes to some degree. Yet blaming the victims becomes more serious when it is done by professionals who are rather supposed to help victims. "It's human to blame the victim for what happened, and astrologers are not exempt from this tendency", wrote astrologer Donna Cunningham. In astrological 'projection theory' there is, in fact, embedded an assumption that the victim must have done something to 'deserve his fate', thus the victim is blamed, not the scapegoater or victimizer.


WHO IS TO BLAME ?

And so you ask, 'What about the innocent bystanders?' But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent. - Abbie Hoffman

There are a lot of popular myths claiming that victims ask what they get: rape victims are said to have provoked it somehow, in astrology Neptunians are said to be victims because of their 'masochistic' tendencies, even incest victims are said to seduce their parents. Perhaps we can't see the victim as innocent, because by so doing we would have to admit that similar things might happen even to us. We blame the victim in order to feel more in control.

Who is to blame? We all are. Every time we refuse to see the victim as a victim or close our eyes or turn our backs, every time we refuse to offer compassion or to relieve the scapegoat's suffering any way we can, without blaming him, we are joining the ranks of the scapegoaters or torturers. We are leaving the scapegoat alone to make sense out of his senseless suffering. Blaming - and thus isolating - the scapegoat or any other victim we make them even more helpless.

In astrology there are many ways to blame the victim. When the astrologer claims that cruelty victims with Mars-Saturn afflictions on their horoscopes have attracted cruelty because there is some inner core of cruelty within them, the astrologer is just offering cruel speculations. No horoscope says that much. Mars-Saturn may even reflect an encounter with a cruel astrologer. Furthermore, in practice truly cruel persons do not usually attract persons with some cruelty within them, they attract innocents, as they get their kicks better that way.

Perhaps nature even may sometimes - as Spinoza says - "abhor a vacuum", you may not attract cruelty because there is cruelty in you, but just because there isn't. Do cats and dogs men mistreat attract cruelty because of having it in their own psyche? Do babies? "All children are potential victims, dependent upon the world's good will", wrote Sally Kempton. And so are some adults because after being kicked around since early childhood, they have never learned how to defend themselves. And they will never learn if we place the responsibility of others' doings on them.


WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE

All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul. - Mohandas Gandhi

Who is responsible for victimization. We all are. We all create collective unconscious forces that seek manifestation in scapegoating cases. We cannot rid us of our own responsibility by blaming the victim or saying that he or she asked for it, we asked it too as long as our attitude is callous and our eyes closed to the victim's suffering.

Of course it is often extremely hard to know whether someone is truly innocent or not. Or how much there is innocence and how much of it is of her or his own doing. Yet, in scapegoating cases it is always better to assume too much innocence than the other way around. Sri Aurobindo very wisely said that the better you see something evil as something that is not a part of yourself but comes from the outside, the better you can get free of it and refuse it.

We add to our own responsibility every time we blame the victim. Meeting a victim may even be life's way of teaching us a lesson of compassion, perhaps we should learn to see our own role in the scapegoating process. As long as we do not take the responsibility and stop blaming the victim, we are scapegoaters. And being neutral isn't any better, neutrality may be oppression too.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. - Bishop Desmond Tutu

Read more: Scapegoating < Scapegoating Defined < Origins of Scapegoating < Scapegoats - Archetypal Transference Figures < Driven into Dsolation < Scapegoating Groups < Scapegoaters < A Collective Daimon < Never blame the victim > The Dreyfus Case > Scapegoating in Astrology > Creating Scapegoats > Astrological Rethinking Needed > Neptunians - Astrology's Victims ? > Persecution > Surviving Ccapegoating > Transcending Ccapegoating - A Life in Grace

NEPTUNIA, in September 2003

More essays: Essays and Articles
Quotations? Welcome to Anyara-Aphorisms

© Anyara 2003