Helping agency Victim Support has found victim blaming across all crimes for all genders and ethnicities and has concluded it’s embedded in New Zealand culture in a new study.
Victim blaming is where victims are held partly or fully responsible for the harm they experience.
Victim Support, a non-government organisation that provides 24-hour support, advocacy and information to those affected by crime and trauma, interviewed 31 adults affected by 10 different crimes.
The study is called Experiences of victim blaming and its impact on help-seeking, crime reporting and recovery.
The participants included people who were victims of family violence, sexual violence, assaults, people who lost loved ones to homicide, theft, survivors of road crashes, harassment, willful damage and fraud.
Head researcher Dr Petrina Hargrave Hargrave said victim blaming manifested through criticism or minimalisation of the experience or was treated as if the victim provoked or welcomed the offender.
Huge impact
Victims faced scrutiny from people around them in their communities, neighbours, the justice system, on social media and primarily from friends and family.
Dr Hargrave said victim blaming had huge impact where victims were less likely to reach out for help or support, and it deterred them from reporting the harm. People said they were isolated, became distrustful and antisocial, lost self-esteem and developed mental health issues, including suicidal thoughts.
Victim Support also found harmful stereotypes underpinned by racism and colonisation impacted Māori and that Māori victimisation needed to be understood by historic trauma and institutional racism.
Russell Smith (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu), a kaupapa Māori harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) specialist and co-founder of Korowai Tumanako, a kaupapa Maori harmful sexual behaviour specialist treatment service, said in the harmful sexual behaviour space, they often worked with committers of harm who blamed the people they had harmed or the families of the people and could struggle to take responsibility for their actions.
A victim of ‘stealthing’
Te Ao Māori News interviewed a wahine Māori who was a victim of stealthing, which is considered to be rape in which an offender removes his condom without consent.
For the sake of privacy, we will call her Cassidy in this article.
Cassidy wasn’t aware she had been assaulted until she had a pregnancy scare, which turned out to be a false alarm. However, the man she was sleeping with admitted to removing the condom without her consent.
“It took me like a few months to a year, I’d say to really register that it was assault and that I was victim-blamed, because I just blamed myself for like ages. Like ‘that was stupid, I shouldn’t have done that’ rather than placing the blame on him.”
Cassidy’s mum was her go-to support person but, when she told her what happened, her mum asked:“Why did you sleep with someone you didn’t know?” and “Why were you drunk?”.
It happened again, a couple of years later when she was sober and again, she said, she went to her mum who asked: “Why would you do that?” and it was, automatically, her fault.
Family blamed her
Throughout the court case Cassidy experienced victim blaming. When she told a select group of whānau members, she was called a “slut”, told she was overreacting, and that it was her fault because she couldn’t “close her legs”. And her father asked how it happened, whether she was drunk or on drugs.
“My mum actually said to me: ‘You just keep getting yourself in these situations’, so I went ahead in my court case all by myself.”
Cassidy said it fractured the relationships and she still couldn’t talk about the assault with her whānau.
“You shouldn’t feel like that with your parents. If they really loved and cared for you, they should be there for you through that stuff.”
She said she was traumatised, especially because it happened twice but the victim blaming made it worse and amplified it.
In fact, she said she experienced this a third time but didn’t want to go through the process again because she didn’t want to be accused of crying wolf or making something out of nothing and it was her fault.
The ideal victim
Hargrave said the concept of the ideal victim was someone who society saw as weak and innocent, who was victimised in public while doing a respectable activity.
This came from research in the 1970s, which wanted to work out why some victims received sympathy and empathy and others were scorned and blamed.
The ideal victim might be an elderly women shopping at the supermarket versus a sex worker who was assaulted at night. Men, who were victims of rape by women weren’t ideal victims, and people might not believe them or might blame them.
Cassidy said she experienced this degree of victim blaming as well.
“I’ve always been pretty out there with my body and what I wear and, as a woman, if you’re having casual sex or sleeping with people that aren’t your partner and assault happens to you, you’re automatically to blame,” she said.
Wāhine Māori don’t report
Sexual behaviour specialist Russell Smith recalled a hohourongo (conflict resolution) with a whānau where they were backing the person who had done the harm because they didn’t believe he could do that. They said the victim was lying and he said he and his colleague had to pause for a moment and ask them: “Why are you here?”
“Because of what she said,” the whānau replied. And he said: “Let’s be really clear about why we’re here. We’re here because of the harm that person chose to do.”
“It’s a sad state, wāhine Māori don’t report because they’re not believed, not only by friends and family but by the state services that are supposed to be there to serve them,” he said.
Smith referred to a victim he was supporting in court recently and a police officer walked in and she said: “Oh my god, he’s the one that interviewed me and called me a liar.”
He said even one police officer or social worker could create broad ripples.
Cassidy said, when she reported her offender, the police interviewed him after a few months and then the detective called her to say the offender was really apologetic, it was his first offence and he was working fulltime.
They said she could drop it or take it to court but she felt coerced into dropping it.
Māoritanga - her saving grace
At the time Cassidy wasn’t as connected to her Maoritanga, and “from that experience, I connected more to te ao Maori as a saving grace really to get me through.”
She wasn’t working and was offered work in the rohe she has whakapapa to and that completely changed her life - the feeling of being on the whenua where her tipuna, whānau, marae, hapū and iwi were.
“It almost gave me a purpose bigger than myself because what I was going through, there was no sense of collectivism to get me through. We’re meant to wrap around people in their time of need, it takes a village. That wasn’t the case for me, it was an individual journey.”
Being able to connect to te ao Māori, her whenua and people allowed her to be part of something bigger and to heal.
“That’s really where I started connecting with my tipuna, and like my tipuna were guiding me through this and they were going to get me through the other side and they did.”
She said she would go through trials and tribulations for the rest of her life but having her tipuna at the forefront made the downs more bearable.
She said there should be more kaupapa Māori support similar to the work Smith did at Korowai Tumanako in helping support Māori victims from a Māori worldview and with tikanga.
“If they do recognise that someone is Maori, they should put it as the first option.”
What New Zealand needs to do
Smith said there needed to be more work done in education and people needed access to good information and prevention strategies.
Cassidy said she did believe the person who abused her was apologetic and it was a lack of education, which she said wasn’t to excuse him but she didn’t think he knew what he had done.
Victim Support has now launched a campaign to end victim blaming to “change the script” and for people to understand their words had power.
Hargrave said if someone disclosed they needed support, they shouldn’t face condemnation.
She said all the victims she interviewed wanted to hear four words: “It’s not your fault.”