Blaming The Survivor
Why do survivors of severe child abuse have such a hard time getting what happened to them, and it's repercussions, recognised and accepted?
One part of the equation may be found in a series of experiments from the US.
At Harvard University John D Hanson and Kathleen Hanson report on a series of experiments carried out by renowned social psychologist Dr Melvin Lerner, where he demonstrated that people want to feel a sense of justice and, consistent with that wish, actively work to eliminate injustice.
Lerner also discovered, however, that people can get that sense of justice by troubling means: When a person finds that alleviating innocent suffering is at all difficult or complex,the person then re-conceives the victim as deserving the suffering and does this by assigning negative characteristics to the victim.
In a typical experiment, 12 subjects were told they were observing a study of learning techniques. As the subjects watched, a volunteer appeared to suffer painful shocks as punishment for incorrect answers.
One group of subjects was offered a choice either to reassign the volunteer to a different study with monetary rewards for correct answers, or to allow the punishing electric jolts to continue.
A second group of subjects was given no reassignment option—they could only observe helplessly as the volunteer apparently continued to be shocked for incorrect answers.
The subjects were then questioned about the person who had supposedly been shocked.
The first group, which had the easy officially sanctioned option of ending the victim’s suffering, typically opted to do so.That should be unsurprising; after all, what kind of person would not put a stop to undeserved suffering? In a later debriefing, subjects in that first group tended to describe the volunteers as likeable, innocent victims of shocks who deserved to be reassigned to a positive reinforcement environment.
But the second group of subjects, who were not given an option to end the volunteer's suffering, took a less obvious path to justice. Rather than describing the volunteer as an innocent victim worthy of sympathy and compassion these subjects tended to disparage and blame the victim. “The sight of an innocent person suffering . . . motivated people to devalue the attractiveness of the victim in order to bring about a more appropriate fit between their fate and their character.” In other words, as they was suffering it must be their fault.
Lerner’s results powerfully illustrate two ways in which individuals cope when witnessing distress and suffering: we stop the injustice, or if unable to stop it and thus be left with powerful feelings of injustice and helplessness, we unconsciously avoid these feelings by instead conceiving of the victim as a person who actually “deserves” to suffer.
Thus for example on realising that an adult was abused by their parents, and is still suffering badly, to avoid their own feelings of helplessness people can be heard to often blame the survivor ' Who must have brought it on themselves' or try and 'fix' the survivor, by then telling them to 'Put it all behind them' or 'Let it go' , leaving the survivor once more emotionally abandoned.
"Thus is revealed one of the sources of our great confusion: we abhor, not injustice, but the dissonance that perceived injustice creates within us."
Source
Adapted from 'The Blame Frame' - John D Hanson & Kathleen Hanson. Harvard University