Quotes About Victim-blaming

Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don't get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them. JESSICA VALENTI The Purity Myth

Women don't get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.

they share this common idea that a rapist is a guy in a ski mask, wielding a knife, who drags women into the bushes. But these undetected rapists don't wear masks or wield knives or drag women into the bushes. So they had absolutely no sense of themselves as rapists and were only too happy to talk about their sexual behaviors.

I understood why parents would want to do that, but it wasn't the message I was going for. If anyone should change their behaviour, I thought, it ought to be those doing the shaming. Justine's crime had been a badly worded joke mocking privilege. To see the catastrophe as her fault felt to me a little like 'Don't wear short skirts'. It felt like victim-blaming.

Familiar words for dead black boys portrayed as complicit in their own demise. Michael Donald's body had been hanged on a Mobile street, and the police were doing the same thing to his name.

Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional, a malicious conspirator, a pathological liar, a whiner who doesn't recognize it's all in fun, or all of the above.

One disturbing aspect of abuse and harassment is the idea that it's not the crime that's the betrayal but the testimony about the crime. You're not supposed to tell. Abusers often assume this privilege that demands the silence of the abused, that a nonreciprocal protection be in place. Others often impose it as well, portraying the victims as choosing to ruin a career or a family, as though the assailant did not make that choice himself.

I hate rape cases. You don't throw a murder case to a jury and they ask, 'Well, was the guy really murdered or is he lying because he wants the attention? And what was he doing in that part of town? And why was he drinking? And what about all those murderers he dated before?

the same people who'd ask an abused woman why she doesn't leave the city where her ex lives, leave the firm where he works, leave her friends and her family and her job and let him have the satisfaction of driving her out.

If you get robbed, no one's going to ask you, 'Well, what were you wearing?'

People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.

Defense lawyer did his job by attacking the victim shouting that she drank, she danced, she dressed to look good she wanted it, she followed him liked it rough or planned on marriage or extortion as she cried on the stand, long blonde hair in front of her face, a curtain for her sanity, he painted her into a corner with accusations

This is a jury of your peers. They watch the same TV movies. They belong to Oprah's Book Club. You can take any monster, slap a bad dad into his past, and all of a sudden he's just another lost soul, lashing out. And you were the poor lady that got in the way. They'll argue you lacked compassion. You were the one who took things too far.

Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don't get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.

In addition to shaming sexual-assault victims, positioning abstinence as women's domain further promotes the notion that it's women's morality that's on the line when it comes to sex, men just can't help themselves, so their ethics are safe from criticism.

I've heard many women say that they were afraid to come out or they were too ashamed to talk about it because they thought it was something they had done to promote the man to sexually harass them - and that is not the case.

In analyzing the sex-class system, feminists are accused of inventing or perpetuating it. Calling attention to it, we are told, insults women by suggesting that they are victims, stupid enough to allow themselves to be victimized. Feminists are accused of being the agents of degradation by postulation that such degradation exists.

Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault. We chant in unison. Who led them on? She did. She did. She did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.

My dad had told me that if you stayed out after nine and you were a girl it meant that you wanted to have sex with whoever was passing by. He told me that if I got raped after nine o'clock the courts would probably say I deserved it.

Michael Brown - when he lost his life, there was more focus on what he had done sometimes than what was done to him.

In India and elsewhere in the world, the moment a woman speaks out against harassment, people sort of start making all sorts of character judgments about her, about her morality, about what she was wearing, and all such things, and I think that is not fair.

parents often rationalized that somehow their kids must have done something to deserve the abuse.

Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.

Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.