So, which blame game am I talking about? Well, not hard to guess! Its about the society blaming the victim for crimes. Particularly victims of sexual violence against women. Let's start with this awesome sarcastic, viral video:
Sparing the ones with modern thoughts, the ones who get and love the above video, there is a huge population in India that firmly believes that somewhere, it must have been the victim's fault. Okay, lets go through this, it must not be hard: Its a normal daily activity that you are pursuing, travelling or just your profession. Most of us have at least one daily activity in which we interact with strangers, travelling is one example. So, on a regular encounter with strangers, you had a male companion but you had no idea that those regular strangers were a bunch of united people with a good level of mutual understanding and ofcourse bad intentions too. The strangers execute what was on their mind and control slips out of your and your male companion's hands in just seconds and once they have the power on you, its even harder to beat that and escape. In all this, do you see any fault of the victim? Probably (hopefully), no. But, there is a huge population of India that sees largely the victim's fault. I am not saying that they say find the criminals correct or good, but before anything else, they'll point out something where, according to them, our victim went wrong. Obviously, its unfair and incorrect of them to call the victim at fault. So, lets go through the psychology behind this.
Its defensive attribution which is at play. Now, what is that? As wikipedia defines it: The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term from the attributional approach referring to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of defending the individual from concern that they will be the cause or victim of a mishap. In simpler words, we humans have a tendency to believe that this world is a good and fair place to live in. Acknowledging that the world is unfair and that something unfortunate can happen to you based on chance factors would lead to a sense of fear and vulnerability which we would naturally want to avoid. So, whenever we hear of some incident we have a tendency to explain that it was the victim's fault and that if I or someone closely related to me doesn't make that mistake, we'll be absolutely safe. In some sense, that's a coping mechanism to make oneself feel better and less insecure about it.
Well, I learnt all that in my psychology class. Now the next thing that comes to my mind is, why is this blaming trend more in India than in the west. Is there something like the tendency to make defensive attribution is higher in our culture than in theirs? So, let us look at the basic difference in our cultures. Western culture is predominantly individualistic while ours is a collectivistic one. Individualistic culture is one which is oriented around the self, where humans are viewed as independent beings instead of being identified with a community, Whereas, a collectivistic culture is one where there is a higher emphasis on interdependence of beings, where people belong to a particular political, religious or ethnic group and are expected to exhibit behavior that matches the interest and beliefs of the group. A simple way to understand this cultural discussion is to look at an example: If in a group of people that share the same workplace, some guy lives a different kind of lifestyle, wears different kinds of clothes and pursues an indifferent set of hobbies than the usual one. Such a group in India has a tendency to talk about that person behind his back, exclude him out of casual group meetings, and call him a not-normal or not-our-type person. While such a group in the west is more likely to accept this guy's differences, live with it comfortably and even let him be a part of their larger group.
Now here is my attempt to relate this cultural difference with the blame game: Generally, in a collectivistic culture, if something goes wrong, people have a tendency to blame everyone involved while in an individualistic culture, the fellow at the root cause is solely responsible for what happened. In a crime, both the criminal and victim are deeply involved and hence we have a tendency to put some amount of blame on each given our culture. While the same crime in the west will be viewed more as the criminal's fault than that of the victim's. So, our cultural structure in addition to the normal tendency of defensive attribution leads to a relatively high tendency to blame the victim than the westerners do.
Now is it okay or acceptable on someone's part to blame the victim? Well, no! Although defensive attributions are self-protective, somewhat natural but certainly an irrational strategy that helps us avoid unnerving thoughts and give a feel of our life being in our control. As healthy individuals, we should try to look at things from the perspective of the victim and stop this blaming!
Note: the relation of culture with blaming is completely my view and arguments are most welcome. :)
Sparing the ones with modern thoughts, the ones who get and love the above video, there is a huge population in India that firmly believes that somewhere, it must have been the victim's fault. Okay, lets go through this, it must not be hard: Its a normal daily activity that you are pursuing, travelling or just your profession. Most of us have at least one daily activity in which we interact with strangers, travelling is one example. So, on a regular encounter with strangers, you had a male companion but you had no idea that those regular strangers were a bunch of united people with a good level of mutual understanding and ofcourse bad intentions too. The strangers execute what was on their mind and control slips out of your and your male companion's hands in just seconds and once they have the power on you, its even harder to beat that and escape. In all this, do you see any fault of the victim? Probably (hopefully), no. But, there is a huge population of India that sees largely the victim's fault. I am not saying that they say find the criminals correct or good, but before anything else, they'll point out something where, according to them, our victim went wrong. Obviously, its unfair and incorrect of them to call the victim at fault. So, lets go through the psychology behind this.
Its defensive attribution which is at play. Now, what is that? As wikipedia defines it: The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term from the attributional approach referring to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of defending the individual from concern that they will be the cause or victim of a mishap. In simpler words, we humans have a tendency to believe that this world is a good and fair place to live in. Acknowledging that the world is unfair and that something unfortunate can happen to you based on chance factors would lead to a sense of fear and vulnerability which we would naturally want to avoid. So, whenever we hear of some incident we have a tendency to explain that it was the victim's fault and that if I or someone closely related to me doesn't make that mistake, we'll be absolutely safe. In some sense, that's a coping mechanism to make oneself feel better and less insecure about it.
Well, I learnt all that in my psychology class. Now the next thing that comes to my mind is, why is this blaming trend more in India than in the west. Is there something like the tendency to make defensive attribution is higher in our culture than in theirs? So, let us look at the basic difference in our cultures. Western culture is predominantly individualistic while ours is a collectivistic one. Individualistic culture is one which is oriented around the self, where humans are viewed as independent beings instead of being identified with a community, Whereas, a collectivistic culture is one where there is a higher emphasis on interdependence of beings, where people belong to a particular political, religious or ethnic group and are expected to exhibit behavior that matches the interest and beliefs of the group. A simple way to understand this cultural discussion is to look at an example: If in a group of people that share the same workplace, some guy lives a different kind of lifestyle, wears different kinds of clothes and pursues an indifferent set of hobbies than the usual one. Such a group in India has a tendency to talk about that person behind his back, exclude him out of casual group meetings, and call him a not-normal or not-our-type person. While such a group in the west is more likely to accept this guy's differences, live with it comfortably and even let him be a part of their larger group.
Now here is my attempt to relate this cultural difference with the blame game: Generally, in a collectivistic culture, if something goes wrong, people have a tendency to blame everyone involved while in an individualistic culture, the fellow at the root cause is solely responsible for what happened. In a crime, both the criminal and victim are deeply involved and hence we have a tendency to put some amount of blame on each given our culture. While the same crime in the west will be viewed more as the criminal's fault than that of the victim's. So, our cultural structure in addition to the normal tendency of defensive attribution leads to a relatively high tendency to blame the victim than the westerners do.
Now is it okay or acceptable on someone's part to blame the victim? Well, no! Although defensive attributions are self-protective, somewhat natural but certainly an irrational strategy that helps us avoid unnerving thoughts and give a feel of our life being in our control. As healthy individuals, we should try to look at things from the perspective of the victim and stop this blaming!
Note: the relation of culture with blaming is completely my view and arguments are most welcome. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment