Victim Blame

We are all very much used to the excuses of politicians & the powerful. But we should not be lulled into letting a blame culture evolve out of those excuses and surround us.

As leaders might seek to shift the focus of attention away from them and what they have done, so too they might seek to shift the blame.

'Such men as Papineau, and others of note, were dismissed... for creating disaffection among the people by their language'      -Thomas Storrow Brown, 1872.

These were the responses of British Imperial authorities to words of 'such men as Papineau', who spoke against governing abuses and led a movement that began calling for Responsible Government and ended in full blown rebellion. As a critic, along with allies and followers, he found himself blamed for pointing out injustice, rather than those who created and perpetuated the injustice.

There is a similar tendency to blame the poor for being poor; to blame the oppressed for upsetting the status quo by expressing their dissatisfaction with the system, a dissatisfaction that Oscar Wilde (1891) admired:

'the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue'

Wilde observed that the powerful profited greatly from trammelling the poor into finding virtue or personal blame in their state of poverty, noting that 'in that case he is far more obedient'.

Protesters have suffered from this blame & stigma; the violent minority amongst them being used as an excuse to blame those campaigning for upsetting good order, rather than addressing the injustices that provoked them. The latest example is the police willingness to treat masked & self-titled 'anarchist' teenagers smashing windows as the face of an entire political ideology, one that inspired the likes of Oscar Wilde and George Orwell - Orwell who fought alongside the Anarchists against the Fascists in Spain (Orwell, 1936); in order to justify rounding up the followers of an alternate ideology (Booth, 2011).

The targets of this kind of blame-shifting culture are not just limited to those who speak out and march against injustices, but also direct victims:

'On January 24th, 2011, a representative of the Toronto Police gave shocking insight into the Force’s view of sexual assault by stating: "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized"'            -excerpted from slutwalktoronto.com

Victims are blamed for making themselves a target; victims are blamed for being victims. And once more an injustice has provoked protest. Those protests, the Slut Walks, are bringing light to this shameful process of shifting blame to those who have no voice to answer and this is making the Slut Walks a powerful movement. From the original events in downtown Toronto, these protest marches have have now reached as far as Delhi in India (BBC, 2011) and provoked both support and outrage from across the political & journalistic spectrum.

Toronto walk organizer Sonya Barnett has demanded that victim-shaming change (CBC, 2011); it is an aim that all those who protest injustice will support with fervour.

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References:
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+ Thomas Storrow Brown's 'Brief Sketch of the Life and Times of the Hon. Louis Joseph Papineau'; Dominion Monthly, January 1872.

+ Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of Man under Socialism'; London, 1891.


+ George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia'; Secker & Warburg, 1936.

+ Robert Booth's 'Anarchists should be reported, advises Westminster anti-terror police'; in The Guardian; 31 July 2011;

+ BBC's 'India 'Slutwalk' sex harassment protest held in Delhi'; 31 July 2011;

+ CBC's 'Slut walks: Are they helping to bring about change?'; 8 May 2011;