We Are Still Blaming Victims
- Cody Thomas Rounds
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
We Are Still Blaming Victims
It is hard to see what you have never learned to name. That’s the central problem of modern victim blaming: it has become so embedded in our institutions, so disguised by the language of care and reform, that we no longer recognize it when we’re doing it. But we are. And it’s time to say so plainly.
Victim blaming is no longer just a cruel comment or an insensitive question. It is a system—a logic, a cultural reflex disguised as compassion. And more disturbingly, it is the default setting of many criminal justice reforms, especially in progressive cities that pride themselves on being forward-thinking. This is not a debate about empathy. It is about power. And right now, that power is flowing away from victims—and toward the people who harmed them. We have created a new set of rules and social contracts that prioritize the comfort and potential for redemption of the aggressor, while the experience of the person who was harmed is rendered secondary, a mere complication to the larger narrative of systemic change.
Victim Blaming Is a Form of Institutional Power
The modern version of victim blaming doesn’t scream. It soothes. It doesn’t say “She asked for it.” It says “He’s struggling.” It doesn’t call the victim a liar—it simply redirects attention, language, and policy toward the comfort and redemption of the offender. This approach fundamentally violates the baseline standards of an equitable system, which should recognize that harm has occurred and work to mitigate it. Instead, institutions wield their power to enforce a victim-blaming framework. We see this in the economic trappings used to control a woman in an abusive relationship, where the legal system may grant a man control of financial assets or child custody, while a woman's options for reporting abuse are made inaccessible. Her requests for justice are dismissed as an emotional overreaction, while his demands for “fairness” are taken as fact.
This is a system that thrives on denial, just like the profound denial that can surround child abuse. The person in power, whether it is a family or an institution, doesn't simply ignore the abuse; they actively create a reality where it does not exist. We see a powerful, if fictional, example in the Dursley family from the Harry Potter series. The Dursleys didn't just ignore Harry’s trauma; they actively reframed it as his own fault, casting him as the offender and their own son Dudley as the helpless victim. This warped reality became the absolute law of their household. Dudley’s emotional needs were centered and catered to with overindulgence, while Harry was denied access to narrative justice—the right to tell his own story without interruption or censure. He was punished for his reactions to abuse and denied the chance to access procedural justice—a fair and impartial process for seeking help. The Dursleys’ family dynamic is a perfect microcosm of institutional denial, where the power structure punishes the vulnerable and rewards the powerful, all while claiming innocence. The injustice is so profound it's almost invisible, a logic so deeply ingrained that only a child's suffering can fully expose it.
What does it mean when a woman calls the police three times after a man breaks into her home, urinates on her property, and returns again—and the system releases him each time? It means the law is no longer structured to protect her. It is structured to explain him. It is not that she is disbelieved. It is that her experience is rendered irrelevant. This is not an accident. It is a system of rules, habits, language, and beliefs that all conspire to do the same thing: preserve the comfort of the unhurt at the expense of the wounded.
We’ve Scaled Up the Dysfunction of an Abusive Family
This system mirrors the psychology of abusive households. In those families, the person who causes harm becomes the emotional center of gravity. Everyone else adapts. Everyone else walks on eggshells. Victims are told to forgive, to understand, to calm down. Their needs are deferred for the sake of “keeping the peace.” When they speak up, they are labeled difficult, angry, unstable. When they cry, it’s “too much.” When they’re silent, it’s “not helpful.”
On a community level, we are doing the exact same thing. We see it in the language of some modern justice reforms, where a victim who is too scared to face their abuser is suddenly seen as a roadblock to “healing.” When a survivor of a violent crime declines to participate in a restorative justice circle, their refusal is often reframed as a failure to be “part of the solution.” The community, and the system, is not walking on eggshells around the victim's pain; it is walking on eggshells around the perpetrator’s potential for redemption. We treat the person who harmed as the fragile one, the one we must accommodate. The one whose background justifies their behavior. We’ve moved the entire legal and social framework around their pain—not the victim’s. We call it reform. But to the victim, it feels like abandonment.
It Feels Good to Blame Victims
Here’s the part no one wants to admit: victim blaming feels good. It feels good because it offers moral superiority. If I can find a reason why the victim was at fault—what she wore, what time it was, how she reacted—then I am safe. I am smarter. I would never let that happen to me. This isn't just a passive feeling; it's a form of moral inertia. The sense of being safe and smarter creates a powerful disincentive to act. By explaining harm away, we don't have to sit with the difficult, uncomfortable truth of what was done to someone. This intellectual comfort allows us to accept inaction and systemic failure, all while believing we are on the side of justice.
It feels good because it creates a hierarchy based on enlightened knowledge. We are not the victim, caught in the mess of pain and emotion. We are not the perpetrator, a simple "bad guy" to be punished. We are the wise ones, the saviors of the downtrodden. This places us in a position of perceived authority, where we can lecture on abstract principles without confronting the messy, painful reality of the victim’s experience. In this worldview, the abuser is converted into a victim of their own past circumstances—a product of a broken system, a harsh upbringing, or a lack of resources. By acknowledging their pain, we absolve them of their current behavior, effectively acting as a priest absolver who stands above the simple, messy act of abuse against a victim. We are concerned not with the victim's immediate pain, but with a more grandiose, cosmic justice. The victim is reduced to a data point in a debate, their humanity secondary to this intellectual exercise of blame.
In this sense, victim blaming becomes our sacrificial lambs. We sacrifice the victim’s humanity and narrative to the altar of our own rage, a rage that we are not allowed to express in modern society. This act of sublimation allows us to feel the satisfaction of punishment and righteous indignation, all while maintaining our positions within the power structures that serve us (protector, enlightened one, nice guy). Instead of challenging a system that allows harm to exist, we instead blame the most convenient target—the one who was hurt—and in doing so, we preserve the comforting status quo. This allows us to maintain our denial—a profound denial of the true nature of humanity as potentially brutal, unkind, and horrifying. We convert our denial of this truth, and our own capacity for brutality, into an attack on the victim. And it feels good.
It feels good because it absolves. If harm is an abstraction, if violence is a systemic accident, then we never have to sit with the raw truth of what was done to someone. We can talk about risk. We can talk about policy. We don’t have to talk about pain. Victim blaming offers a sense of clarity in a world that feels chaotic. It tells you who the bad guy is. And increasingly, it suggests it might not be the person who did the harming.
It’s Functionally Undetectable—Because We’ve Never Been Taught to See It
You cannot see what you were never taught to recognize. That’s why modern victim blaming is so difficult to fight. It doesn’t look like blaming. It looks like fairness. It looks like neutrality. It looks like compassion. It is anything but.
The problem is not that we are intentionally cruel; the problem is that we are human. Our brains are wired for efficiency, not truth. We rely on cognitive shortcuts and biases to make sense of a world that is too complex to process in real time. We want simple answers to complicated problems. It’s easier for our brains to blame a victim than to grapple with the chaotic truth that bad things happen to good people for no reason. Our need for order compels us to find a cause, a fault, a reason—and the person who was harmed is a convenient, if unjust, place to put that responsibility.
This need for certainty is what makes modern victim blaming so effective. It offers a sense of control in a chaotic world. It whispers that if we just find the right set of circumstances—what they wore, where they went, how they reacted—we can prevent the same thing from happening to us. This is a powerful, self-protective illusion. It’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook by believing we are immune, because we are smarter. This is why victim blaming is not just a personal failing. It is a fundamental feature of the human operating system. And when we scale it up to the level of institutions, it becomes a system of structured cruelty, disguised as fairness.
When we let a man return again and again to the doorstep of the woman he terrorized, because he hasn’t “failed to appear” in court—what is that if not structured cruelty dressed as due process? When we impose bail only to ensure compliance, not public safety—what is that if not institutionalized apathy? When victims say they’re scared and the system says, “There’s nothing we can do”—what is that if not abandonment? The system is working as designed. That’s the problem. We have confused the rhetoric of fairness with the practice of justice. But fairness without context is cruelty. Neutrality in the face of harm is not justice—it is a permission slip.
Criminal Justice Reform Has Been Victim Blaming All Along
This is the hard truth: many modern reforms are not breaking the cycle. They are recapitulating it. The promise of reform was that we could build a system of care and accountability. But care without protection is not care. And accountability without consequences is not accountability. We believed we could undo mass incarceration without replicating the same indifference that created it. But somewhere along the way, we stopped listening to victims. We turned them into complications. Obstacles. Reputational risks. And in doing so, we reinforced the oldest power dynamic in the book: the community protects the one who hurts, not the one who’s hurt.
This phenomenon has created the accidental advocate. In a world of finite resources, organizations and policymakers that champion criminal justice reform receive vast amounts of attention, funding, and support. But when this support is directed exclusively toward the abuser—for example, funding for substance abuse programs, anger management, and job training for offenders—the system’s focus becomes skewed. While these efforts are not malicious, they are, in effect, a form of resource allocation that inadvertently creates an abuser-centered system and simultaneously decenters the victim. Victims are not seen as a priority for funding or narrative focus; they are treated as an unfortunate externality of a larger social problem.
This is a form of psychological treason. Many individuals who engage in criminal justice reform have a background of growing up in abusive households. By evolution, children are pre-programmed to believe their parents are right and true, at all costs. This is because, from an evolutionary standpoint, a child's life depends on this belief. A profound psychological phenomenon is that children raised in abusive households may go on to hold normalized and protective beliefs about abusers. In essence, they were trained to empathize with their abusers. Without a personal psychological journey to overcome this conditioning, a person will seek, through no intentional act, what is known as recapitulation: the unconscious re-creation of their abusive past in the present. They do this on all scales—in a personal relationship, within a household, and, if in a position of power, within an institution. All criminal justice reform initiatives should be screened for elements that decenter victims from the narrative and normalize abusive behaviors.
Because of this intensive, almost exclusive devotion of resources toward criminal justice reform, the victim is now largely removed from the narrative. We are so far removed from the core issue that abusers are thought of in the context of their socioeconomic struggles, their familial backgrounds, and their "re-entry" into society—not even in the context of their victims. This represents a seismic paradigm shift in the core language of justice. We have replaced the essential question of "What was done to this person?" with "What can we do for this person?" It is a quiet but profound change in our priorities, and it is a change that speaks volumes about who we believe deserves care, attention, and resources.
We have to ask ourselves: what is our real goal? Is it to prevent suffering? Or is it to preserve the appearance of virtue?
When Lay Psychology Becomes Law
One of the most dangerous modern engines of victim blaming is the unchecked rise of lay psychology. What once began as a movement to destigmatize mental health has, over time, congealed into a parallel belief system—one that uses psychological language without psychological understanding. Today, terms like “trauma,” “trigger,” “gaslighting,” and “accountability” are used casually by institutions, journalists, and courts alike, but they no longer refer to anything precise. Instead, they have become moral weapons. Once these terms migrate from clinical tools to cultural habits, their meanings decay—and their misuse becomes routine.
Nowhere is this drift more dangerous than in the judicial system, where a false understanding of mental illness has begun to inform how justice is administered. Judges, attorneys, and advocates—often with no clinical training—invoke psychological tropes to frame offenders as victims and victims as reactive or unstable. And this shift has produced a perverse inversion: the person who shows visible fear is labeled “hysterical,” while the calm, detached offender is often rewarded for appearing composed. This is not just bad logic. It is a textbook example of psychological illiteracy.
Clinically, some of the most dangerous psychiatric disorders—such as psychopathy and pedophilia—are marked by one unmistakable behavioral feature: the ability to falsely present as the victim. These disorders are not simply a matter of “poor regulation” or “untreated trauma.” They involve calculated manipulation (conscious or not), a complete lack of empathy, and a rehearsed display of vulnerability when convenient. In the hands of a psychologically untrained system, these traits are frequently misread as remorse or confusion. The result? Dangerous individuals are mistaken for victims, while actual victims are disbelieved, pathologized, or asked to “see things from both sides.” It is a devastating failure of judgment masquerading as compassion.
The problem isn’t compassion itself—it’s the assumption that psychological compassion can be practiced without psychological knowledge. That mental health language can be borrowed, democratized, and deployed without consequence. But without training, we don’t get insight. We get projection. And projection is how entire systems begin to blame victims while believing they are protecting them.
What Justice Requires
True justice does not pick sides between abuser and victim. It demands truth. It requires us to stop looking away from what happened—to stop explaining harm until it disappears. Justice holds that no one is beyond healing—but no one is exempt from responsibility. That is the path forward. Anything less is just a sophisticated form of silence. We have confused being progressive with being permissive. But sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is believe the person who was harmed. Not just in theory—but when it’s inconvenient, when it’s messy, and when it demands we change the rules.
To achieve this, we must apply heightened scrutiny to every single criminal justice reform initiative and program. We need to actively and consistently review these efforts to ensure they are, and remain, victim-centered. This means that the primary metric for success should not be a reduction in recidivism alone, but also a quantifiable improvement in the safety and well-being of victims. Programs should be designed with the victim’s needs as the first and most critical priority, from their immediate safety to long-term emotional and financial support.
We must also ensure that these programs do not, even inadvertently, engage in the kind of victim blaming we have discussed. The language, policies, and culture of these reforms must be explicitly structured to avoid turning victims into inconveniences or obstacles to an abuser's "rehabilitation." The victim’s narrative must be given the same weight as the abuser’s background, with no part of their story dismissed as an overreaction or a complication.
Furthermore, we need to dismantle excuse mechanisms of accountability. While understanding the roots of an abuser's behavior is important, this understanding must not become a substitute for genuine consequences. Accountability is not merely an intellectual exercise in explaining a past; it is the concrete acceptance of responsibility for a present action. If a program offers a path to absolution that does not involve meaningful, verifiable restitution and a demonstrated commitment to change, it is an empty gesture.
Victim blaming has grown up. It has evolved. It speaks your language now, and it wears the mask of justice. It’s time to take the mask off.
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