Victim Blaming Quotes

“Shouldn't there be more distaste in our mouths for the abusers than for those who continue to love the abusers?”
― Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us

“Attitude Is Everything

We live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations.

The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances?

When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.”
― Sandra Lee Dennis

“Does one deserve to have evil done to her by consequence of putting herself where evil can reach her?”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.
I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“As a girl, she was a legal prey, especially if she was dressed in a worn black leather jacket and had pierced eyebrows, tattoos, and zero social status.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

“I give the victim the benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations of rape and sexual abuse. I choose to err on that side of caution. This does not mean I am unsympathetic to the wrongly accused, but if there are sides to be chosen, I am on the side of the victim.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“It is more like carrying something really heavy, forever. You do not get to put it down: you have to carry it, and so you carry it the way you need to, however it fits best.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.”
― Gloria Steinem, The Trouble With Rich Women

“You can always evaluate a man's character by the way he speaks about his ex girlfriends and other women. When entering a new relationship or getting close with a new guy, make sure you take notice of the language he uses when referring to other girls”
― Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women

“Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape--I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance--which was not chance--had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this:
She was Cunt.
She had "lost" something.
Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick--but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had "gotten away with" something (possibly what she had "lost").
And there I was at eleven years of age:
She was out late at night.
She was in the wrong part of town.
Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.
She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.
I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane--or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.
I was dirty.
I was crying.
I demanded comfort.
I was being inconvenient.
I did not disappear into thin air.”
― Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“Can a woman not walk with her possessions down the street of a city?”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Intelligent people, as some say, in their openness, are indeed slow to criticize, but conversely, in their openness to the concerns of others, the genuine are slow to fret about being criticized.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The most judgmental people are often those who complain most about being judged. The ones not complaining will look as though they're the ones doing the judging.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The part I wanted them to understand is that these equations can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you're sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an airhole with a straw and wondering, 'Now? Now am I safe?”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“She was so upset about a blog that maybe a total of six people read yet had no compassion for her granddaughters who had suffered the physical and emotional pains of sexual abuse and whose lives were changed forever. The two cannot even be compared, yet when someone is in denial about what happened, they cannot perceive what is true. It seemed too hard for her to let her mind go there and believe her grandson could do such terrible things.”
― Erin Merryn, Living for Today: From Incest and Molestation to Fearlessness and Forgiveness

“Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape.
The shaming is in being asked to stand judgment.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“If her years as a reporter had taught her anything, it was these two things: One, the world was filled with people who were adrift, rudderless, and untethered. And two, the innocent always paid for the sins of the guilty.”
― Thrity Umrigar, Honor

“They tell you to get a guy friend to walk you home, not realizing that guy friends can rape you. Take a cab! But the cab driver can rape you. Take an uber, but they're even more rapey. Take the metro -- rapists ride free.
What if everyone was like me, I wondered, and hunted down their respective Will's? Would the economy collapse?”
― Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming

“It was safer for certain people to think she'd had it coming to her; it made it easier to believe it wouldn't come for them.”
― Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search

“Part of this rise of individualism is evident in the mistrust about the social support of vulnerable social groups, such as lone parents, and elderly, or unemployed, people, and in the suggestion that a 'nanny state' was emerging because 'too many' people were dependant on state benefits. (This is in context of a world economy that is creating mass unemployment, where support for the family has consistently been undermined, where elderly people have had services withdrawn that allowed them to be cared for by their families, and so on.) In other words, the ethic of social support being undermined by 'rugged individualism' results in blaming the victim for their own difficulties.”
― Anne Kearney, Counselling, Class and Politics: Undeclared Influences in Therapy

“The usual. Soft focus, syrupy memories of April and her potential.
Sad-faced pictures of h to add a prurient kick to the piece-a hint of scandal, maybe. A student rivalry. A sniff of drugs, or promiscuity, or some other act of disreputable behavior, to give the reader a frisson of disapproval and the safe knowledge that this would never have happened to them.”
― Ruth Ware, The It Girl

“The usual. Soft focus, syrupy memories of April and her potential. Sad-faced pictures of her friends and family pondering all they've lost. Anecdotes about punting and May balls and bright futures. And then some spicy detail, just to add a prurient kick to the piece—a hint of scandal, maybe. A student rivalry. A sniff of drugs, or promiscuity, or some other act of disreputable behavior, to give the reader a frisson of disapproval and the safe knowledge that this would never have happened to them.”
― Ruth Ware, The It Girl

“Rather than empowering themselves, some individuals choose to self-inflict wounds, allowing them to assume the role of the victim.”
― Carlos Wallace, Life is not Complicated, You Are

“I am not saying you did anything," said Sandow mildly. "I'm just saying by dint of what you are, you may have brought this on." Dawes crossed her arms. "That sounds a lot like She was asking for it, Dean Sandow."
Alex couldn't quite believe what she was hearing. Pamela Dawes disagreeing with Dean Sandow. On her behalf.
Sandow set his mug down with a clatter. "That's certainly not what I meant to imply."
"But that is the implication," said Dawes in a voice Alex had never heard her use before, clear and incisive. Her eyes were cold.
"Alex has indicated her own concerns regarding her assault, and instead of hearing her out, you've chosen to question her credibility. You may not have meant to imply anything, but the intent and the effect were to silence her, so it's hard not to think this stinks of victim blaming. It's the semantic equivalent of saying her shit was too short.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“The social class who intends to excavate reasons to justify rape or forced conversion, cannibalise my brain box and moral compass which often says to each other “My dear, it’s so unnecessary.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“Oh, I need help—Bernice, Bernice. The touch of your hand on my face is telegraphed all over me. Can’t you see I’m half-crazed? You’ve got to get me out of this state—”

She laughed a little, and then she said, “How am I to blame? It’s in you, and in all of them, to torture the life out of some poor girl. And because you came across me, you react like a caged chimpanzee, and then try to tell me I got you into the state you’re in. That's a laugh!”
― Cornell Woolrich, Manhattan Love Song

“If you teach your kids to be a victim, you’ll rob them of hope.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, The Path to a Meaningful Life

“We also need to recognise that denial is used by abusers to protect themselves. People who work with sexual offenders talk about a ‘triad of cognitive distortion’. This means that almost every abuser ‘thinks wrongly’ and this is a key area of work for treatment with sexual offenders. Basically they have three wrong thought patterns, and these are denial, minimisation and blame.”
― Carolyn Spring

“We read stories and see YouTube videos about people who, distracted by their smartphones, walk into traffic and off piers into the ocean. Perhaps not surprisingly, a report in 2013 found that pedestrian injuries related to cell phone use more than tripled between 2007 and 2010. And in the first six months of 2015, pedestrian fatalities increased 10 percent, the largest spike in four decades, according to the report. A few years ago, the city of New Haven spray-painted 'LOOK UP' in big yellow letters at crosswalks around the Yale University campus (New York City has taken similar measures). Are admission standards lower these days (probably not), or are these young adults forgetting simple survival skills, overpowered by the pull of their phones?”
― Judson Brewer, The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love – Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits