In the last minute and a half, someone was sexually assaulted. It could have been a man at a club or a woman walking home. It may have been a child in danger or a college student in friend’s dorm. The assailant may have been a stranger or a close friend or even a parent or teacher. It could have been someone they have known all their life or maybe they had never met before. Many variables affect sexual assault, but one thing stays chillingly similar. It is not the victim’s fault. Despite this, blame for an assault is often forced onto the victim in numerous forms. If they choose to talk to a parent or friend, they may be met with attributional defense, questioning the victim’s actions surrounding the attack. This is a form of direct blame, the responsibility of the rape being placed on the victim by friends and family. If they choose to press charges against their attacker, and it is subsequently publicized, media outlets have their own kind of blame, assigned blame, often taking the form of misconstrued and biased descriptions of each party involved and of the rapist’s punishment. Although, the likelihood of a rape case resulting in incarceration is unlikely. Only 10% of all rapes committed are penalized, and only 30% are ever reported. Often this is due to the fear of being blamed or the case being trivialized. The belittlement of rape cases is an unfortunate side effect of the United States’ rape culture. A rape culture is a social environment where rape is normalized and prevalent, proven by the fact that 1/5 women and 1/20 men are raped. But victim blaming is one part of the US’ complex rape culture that when we look at the contributing environmental, psychological, and societal factors, can be resolve. Some such factors include The Bystander Effect, Stanley Milgram’s Theory of Obedience, Social Learning Theory, Defensive Attribution Theory, and Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development. When these theories are analyzed and applied to rape culture and victim blaming, it can help victim blaming become a social exception.

Victim blaming can come from many sources surrounding the victim. The two most prominent are Assigned Blame and Direct Blame. Assigned Blame comes from those who do not personally know the victim, most often media outlets covering the case while Direct blame comes from friends and family as well as acquaintances. According to recent studies, despite what kind of blame is being forced on a victim, the type of person who attributes the responsibility for an assault to the victim is largely the same. The two moral alignments studied are Individualizing values and Binding values. Those with Individualizing values believe no one deserves harm and prioritize the reduction of suffering in situations. Binding values prefer purity, loyalty, and obedience above all other traits. People with binding values are more likely to blame the victims of rape for their actions “provoking” it. People with binding values perceived victims who did not protect themselves to the fullest extent as “Tainted” and thus deserved the assault. When asked, they believed the victim should have taken further precaution, which would have prevented it. “Binding values were related to victim stimulation, victim blame, and victim responsibility”, Says Leane Young, co-conductor of the study proving this. Moral values used in the study and Kohlberg’s theory of Moral Development have similar connections in the way they organize human morality. Kohlberg’s theory has six stages, ranging from a young child’s self-preservation to purely selfless objectives. Binding values privilege loyalty and obedience, particularly in fear of consequence. This is a mindset of “Pre-conventional morality”, a name for the first few stages of Kohlberg’s moral scale. It hinges on preservation in order reduce self-harm at the expense of others. Individualizing values score higher compared to Binding values. They prioritize the protections of others along with their own well being, respecting both as equal. Due to this, they could be ranked as “Post-conventional”, understanding the fluidity of laws and their moral balance and respecting other individual’s needs. Although the values of a person do not make them more or less “Morally Correct” or intelligent, it does change their reactions to a situation. If activists understand who is blaming victims, then they can help their approach to decreasing it.

Part of the larger issue of western rape culture is people blatantly denying help to a victim in need, or simply ignoring the issue. This enduringly hurts the victim, whether it’s from being denied healthcare or medical care to dealing with various mental challenges after an attack without support. This is referred to as the bystander effect and it acts in two ways. Social diffusion, the belief that another witness to an event or issue will become responsible for the problem and resolve it, as well as plural ignorance. Plural ignorance is the assumption that because other bystanders do not seem worried, the bystander shouldn’t be either, following the pattern. Plural ignorance attributes a lot to rape culture. When people assume that rape is unimportant, the survivor’s struggle becomes irrelevant and superficial. Every time a victim’s claims are met with “It’s not a big deal” to the idea that they’re just hysterical pushes the victim into a corner where they have nothing to do but comply. If they disagree, it seems like they are further overreacting. The victim could speak to another trusted contact, but by that time they are most likely stressed and scared that the same scenario will occur with the validity of the claim being doubted. This forces the victim into a situation where even if they would be met with kindness and understanding, they are forced into silence by their own anxiety. Or the victim didn’t feel like they had anywhere to go for help in the first place. Or because of the stigma around reporting rape. This happened to Lea Grover and Rosemery McBea and Abigail Brisland and hundreds and thousands of other victims who were raped but didn’t report it for so many reasons relating to the Bystander Effect. Only 30% of victims ever report their rape, and it’s still dropping. Plural Ignorance is magnified by the media. Media outlets such as magazines, news shows, newspapers, online publications and even social media can spread opinions as fast as people can type them.  These opinions are then broadcasted to the entirety of their viewership and can make an impact on the people who reads it. For rape victims, it can further disqualify their attack from another standpoint, this time from an authority figure which might have not been the case before. But, for people who have not experienced sexual assault it may change the way they treat people who have. If they see and accept the social norm set forth by media, it affects their understanding of rape cases though Plural Ignorance. It continues rape culture and hurts survivors through poor treatment of their experience and stories. Plural Ignorance and the Bystander Effect is not the only place media perpetuates rape culture, though.

The media and how it treats rape cases makes a significant impact on them. How publications treat rapists and victims set the tone for people observing and commenting. If reports blame the victims, others follow suit because it is perceived as correct. The media had the authority to change the way the public sees rape. When Brock Turner raped and unconscious women while attending Stanford University, outrage struck anti-rape activists when headlines referred to turner as “Stanford Swimmer” rather than address him as a rapist. This places emphasis on his achievements rather than the allegations being reported. His trial was treated as if it impacted his life more negatively than his rape victim. Media blame, or assigned blame, controls the conversation surrounding a rape trial because it has the authority on the subject over who reads the articles and watches the trials. According to Stanly Milgram’ theory of Obedience, one who perceives another person or collection of people as an authority figure are more likely to give up control to said authority. “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” Says Milgram in his experiment, in which he tested the personal boundaries of volunteers when prompted by an authoritative figure. He would have a volunteer shock another person every time they got a question by the wrong. Unbeknownst the volunteer, or “Teacher” as he was referred to in Milgram’s study, the no shocks were delivered to the “Learner”, who was an actor aware of the experiments true parameters. The volunteer is prompted by the scientist or “Experimenter” to continue past lethal shock levels. When pushed to this point, 37 out of 40 Teachers complied to the Experimenter. The Teacher could hear screams from the room the Learner was held in, yet continued to administer deadly electrical shocks because they were instructed by a figure of authority to continue. In the application of assigned blame, those who are impacted by the headlines. People who have not experienced sexual assault and may continue the blame put forth by the media onto victim through Direct Blame. The victim in question would be the learner, at least from the perspective of the Teacher. They are receiving punishment or harm that the Teacher may not support or believe in, but continue because of the Experimenter. Of course, this is far from a perfect metaphor. In Milgram’s study, the Learner was never harmed and was aware of the experiment. When the reality in considered, victim blaming can deeply affect someone’s life for the worst. Often, such as in the Turner case, the phrasing in the article causes harm, placing the focus on unimportant details to deter the reader or extenuate the rapist’s positive qualities to skew the public’s opinion of them. This can go to extremes, setting the rapist as a victim. But attention to the rapist’s actions in media coverage can make the conversation reflect positively on the victim. In Harvard researcher Laura Niemi’s study she says, “If you focus less on victims and more on perpetrators, it actually leads to more sympathy for the victim.” If the rapist’s relevant actions are placed on display in an unbiased fashion, then they collect less positive attention. Changing the way see and treat both rapists and victims in the media will help how the people who interact with think about could help positively change society’s conversation about rape and help resolve the issue. Although assigned blame through the media deeply affect sexual assault victim’s lives, direct blame from family and friends can be devastating. “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

Rape victims can have difficulty speaking to friends and family members about their assault for fear of criticism of their actions. It can be excruciating to experience the backlash one might undertake from simply reporting their story to loved ones. Many sexual assault survivors experience “Direct Blame” or blame coming from personal contacts. This can take the form of scrutiny of the victim’s action, questioning the integrity of the assault, or flat out denying the encounter. But where does one learn to disparage rape accounts and the victims involved? The rape culture that America cultivates actively denies rape, harasses victims when they step forward to confront their rapist, support those attackers and prevent them from being properly sentenced. People learn to do the same thing, hurting victims on a different level. This experience can be explained through Bandura’s social learning theory. It posits that people learn from one another through “observation, imitation, and modeling”. He states that that behavior is learned from ones observed environment through the process of Observational Learn. For instance, when a rapist is not prosecuted and the trial is broadcasted people can see it and it becomes an example. “X rape is unimportant because Y rapist was never jailed.” When rapist can get out of jail time, like the 90% that already do, that sends a terrifying message that rape is not a serious or punishable crime. As the US justice system continue to mishandle rape cases, our society continues to mistreat rape victims accordingly. For people to respect rape victims they must first be respected by the culture that people learn from. First, rape culture must change dramatically, from media to rape trials or lack thereof. One of the ways direct blame can affect the victim is through the questioning of their actions that are made to affect the validity of a rape.

In some cases, a story of rape is dismissed due the victim participating in unusual circumstance. This tends to manifest in phrases such as “Why was she drunk?” “What was she wearing?” “She should not have been such a slut.” These are examples of Counterfactual Thinking. Counterfactual Thinking is the human tendency to fictional alternative to events that transpired with a negative outcome. In the case of rape, Counterfactual Thinking often comes from parties surrounding the victim doing what they believe is best, whether it is for the survivor or potential victim. Often it is masked as a safety concern, but in situations where the victim is attacked by someone they already know, it is of little help. The length of one’s skirt does will not increase the chance of sexual assault from a significant other and going to a party with one’s friends will not stop one of those friends from taking advantage of that same drunk person. 70% of rapists are some the victim already knows and 57% happen on dates. In juvenile assault the percentage is even higher, 93% are from a person they know, and more than a third were family members.   The well-meaning advice or thinly veiled blame is not applicable is terrifying situations such as these. But despite this, counterfactual thinking still occurs in conversations about sexual assault. Researchers Amy Grubb and Emily Turner found that these rape myths often manifest in 5 categories of:

1)      “She asked for it”

2)      “It wasn’t really rape”

3)      “He didn’t mean it”

4)      “She wanted it”

5)      “She lied”

But, as Kate Harding explains in her book Asking for It, the use of these myth that fall under the guise of counterfactual thinking are often to supply comfort to one’s self. When people use these myths to discredit a victim’s report, they are using it to distract one’s self from the “Cognitive dissonance” as both Harding and Grubb describe the state of ignorance, of the difference in reality to on beliefs about the world. As Grubb and Turner state in their study, “To believe that rape victims are innocent and not deserving of their fate is incongruous the general beliefs in a just world; therefore, in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, rape myths serve to protect an individual’s beliefs in a just world.”

Even though close to 330 million rapes were committed every year, some people still disagree that the United States has a culture that supports and cultivates rape and rape tolerance. Often, this is dues to the belief that activists and those who draw attention to rape culture are “sensationalizing” rape culture by reporting false data and bringing unnecessary attention to an issue that does not exist. The people who hold these ideas see the widespread attempts to stop, prevent, and spread awareness of the harm rape culture causes is “hysterics” and are overreacting to an issue that is not prevalent in society. But the reality is that society perpetuates the idea of rape being a normal part of life and society. This is evident, because 33% of college men would rape someone if they knew they wouldn’t be caught. Because by the time they are 14, half of all girls will face verbal sexual harassment and one in 5 will be physically harassed. Because half of college students think sex without consent, the definition of rape, is not rape. Because too many people have been harmed to deny the fact of rape culture any longer and those who do continue its violent reign over culture. The US trivializes rape and makes it appear like the fight against rape culture is a fruitless pursuit of people who “just made a mistake”. The trivialized version of a terrifying reality that 30% of people must live with every day.

The United States has a deeply rooted rape culture. One immense part of this is victim blaming, which can be alleviated when fought ageist. Rape victims are often made to feel responsible for their attack. This is due to assigned blame coming from media attention as well as direct blame from those who know the victim. Certain parts of this issue can be explained using Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development, Counterfactual Thinking, Bandura’s Social Learning Theory and The Bystander Effect. Society has devolved into a place where young women feel scared walking down the street and men who have faced rape are told it is not “real rape”. Too many people have been harmed to deny the fact of rape culture any longer and those who do continue its violent reign over culture. But, the disastrous reality of rape culture does not need to continue. It may seem like a horrifying concept, but it can be tackled. If, as a culture, people despite to think differently and talk differently about the issue it can be seen in a much more manageable way. Understanding an issue is the primary step to changing it. Everyone can volunteer at abuse shelters and sexual assault hotlines, such as the one run by RAINN. Letters can be sent to representatives and matches can be marched. In order for a just and right society to prosper, those in it must be respected. If that society supports and normalizes rape, it can never be admirable.