Victim blaming

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Victim blaming or blaming the victim , German perpetrator-victim reversal and victim accusation is the description for a procedure that seeks the blame for an assault on the victim himself. This leads to increased secondary victimization and possibly more severe trauma-related disorders .

This term was mainly used in the United States from the 1970s to describe a criminal defense strategy in rape trials that wants to blame the rape victim for the crime in order to exonerate the accused or alleged perpetrator . In addition to sexual offenses , this type of defense can also be found in the case of violent and racist offenses . The psychologist William Ryan describes blaming the victim in his book of the same name from 1971 as an ideology that is supposed to justify racism against African Americans .

If in the context of z. If , for example, coercion , blackmail or the violation of the very personal sphere of life through picture taking of nude pictures come into circulation, the focus is often on the creation and existence of such picture material, not on the criminal offenses that existed when it was distributed or obtained. This first came into the public eye when the hacker attack on private photos of celebrities in 2014 . 

Victim blaming has also been described in connection with the behavior of narcissists who suggest feelings of guilt to loved ones in order to prevent them from questioning their supremacy.

Outside of victimology and psychotraumatology , the term perpetrator-victim reversal is used in critical theory to describe collective perpetrator-victim blame as a "defense against guilt or memory" or in more recent anti-Semitism research .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Victimization. Kriminologie-Lexikon Online, Ed .: Chair for Criminology, Criminal Policy and Police Science at the Ruhr University Bochum Professor Dr. Thomas Feltes and Institute for Criminology at the University of Tübingen Professor Dr. Hans-Jürgen Kerner, www.krimlex.de (archive) . Also: Hans J. Kerner, Thomas Feltes, Frank Hofmann, Helmut Janssen, Dieter Kettelhöhn: Kriminologie-Lexikon (basics of criminalistics). 4th edition, Hüthig Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7832-0989-7 .
  2. ↑ George Kent: Blaming the Victim, Globally , report (English) ( Memento of December 24, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Kevin D. McCaul, Lois G. Veltum, Vivian Boyechko, Jacqueline J. Crawford: Understanding Attributions of Victim Blame for Rape: Sex, Violence, and Foreseeability . In: Journal of Applied Social Psychology . 20, No. 1, January 1990, pp. 1-26. doi : 10.1111 / j.1559-1816.1990.tb00375.x .
  4. ^ William Ryan: Blaming the Victim. Vintage publishing house, 1971.
  5. ↑ Why sexting among young people is (not) a problem | medienbewusst.de - children. media. competence. Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Sam Vaknin: Narcissistic Blame Game - The Guilt of Others. Retrieved September 14, 2015 .
  7. ↑ See: Ingolf Seidel: Anti-Semitism from a critical-theoretical point of view. Projections and perpetrator-victim reversal: Defense against guilt and memory , haGalil, Jüdisches Leben online ; see. Inge Günther: Anti-Semitism: The constant reversal of perpetrators and victims , Frankfurter Rundschau, October 30, 2019.