MetaKnigel If the Rule is Broken–Break It.

All Blade, No Handle: A Survey of Asian and Western Victim Blaming Acculturation

How would you attribute blame in these research questions? If you had to distribute a total score of 100% between the characters, how would you split it? Do you think that males and females would distribute the total score differently?

1. Jiyoung is at her first membership training. While at the party, her seniors pressure her into drinking many shots of Soju. She groggily wakes up later in a hotel room with one of her male seniors. The senior is having sex with Jiyoung, but Jiyoung does not say anything.

2. Suji is upset because her boyfriend, Jake, of seven years has to work overtime. She knows that he just bought her an expensive handbag and new earrings, so has to work more to pay off the credit card bills. Suji goes out to the club and then goes to a hotel with a man to have sex. Jake’s friend tells Jake about seeing Suji go into the hotel with the man. The next night, when Jake comes home, he is in a rage. He screams at Suji who admits she had an affair. Finally, Jake slaps Suji one time across the face.

3. Hyemin is at a dinner party with her schoolmates. She has been enjoying her conversation with her senior named Taehoon. They have known each other for over one year. Hyemin tells Taehoon that she is tired and too drunk, so she wants to go home. Taehoon offers to bring her to a nearby motel. Hyemin is worried at first, but Taehoon promises that he will be the perfect gentleman—besides, he says, he is like her older brother. Hyemin goes to the motel with Taehoon; however, while she starts to sleep, Taehoon makes sexual advances. Hyemin says she only wants to sleep and keeps rejecting Taehoon until Taehoon becomes frustrated and angry. Hyemin asks Taehoon why he tricked her into coming to the hotel. Taehoon counters saying Hyemin knew his intention all along and knew what was going to happen. Taehoon reminds Hyemin that he paid for the motel room and then tells Hyemin to stop pretending to be innocent.

4. Susanna has been married to John for 10 years. Only John works and they have no children. Susanna usually spends her day watching television until John gets home. While Susanna sometimes cooks dinner, she usually bickers with John until they go out to eat instead. For the last year, Susanna has been rejecting John’s sexual advances. One night after John came home from a late business dinner of which including heavy drinking, John tries to initiate sex with Susanna. When Susanna tells John that she is too tired, John holds her down and continues. While Susanna does repeatedly ask John to stop, she does not fight him and she does not receive any injuries.

In his 1976 classic book studying how social responsibility of poverty diverts to the poor, William Ryan coined the phrase “Blaming the victim”. This term embodies the social, psychological, and behavioral situation of people holding victims at least partly responsible for the transgressions by another. Observers tend to emphasize the victim’s role even when there is no correlation between the victim’s history and the incident.

Before Ryan’s coinage of the term, researchers had noticed victim-blaming situations. For instance, Lerner & Simmons’ classic research in 1966, studied 72 female undergraduates under the guise of an experiment on perceiving emotional cues. The undergraduates observed a peer participating in a learning task. This peer appeared to receive painful electric shocks when making mistakes on the task. Later, the undergraduates described the suffering peer. Those undergraduates, who believed that they would see the victimized peer continue to suffer in a second study, and were powerless to prevent the fate, were more likely to devalue and reject the victim. Lerner and Simmons suggested that an observer’s need to believe in a just world compels observers to reject and devalue victims.

Later, we see more evidence of the just world hypothesis in two studies that demonstrated how reconstructive memory contributes to hindsight bias and how this bias leads people into blaming the victim (Carli 1999). For the first study, subjects read identical scenarios of which either had no ending or ended with rape. The subjects whom received the stories with the ending of rape tended to reconstruct the story as a stereotypical rape narrative while those whom received the no-ending stories were less prone to constructing a rape narrative. For the second study, subjects read identical scenarios of which ended in either rape, or a marriage proposal. Subject’s reconstructions were again consistent with the ending. These stories presented how the hindsight bias affects earlier information and how it predicts derogation of the characters in the stories.

Carli (1999) illuminated how people tend to blame victims in a story; however, Avigail Moor (2007) discussed how the effects of victim blaming damage people psychologically. Rape, for example, is not only a brutal physical assault, but also a violating attack on the self. Rape myths often intensify the original wounds resulting in extreme and continuous guilt and shame of which is likely unresponsive to treatment.
Moor (2007) encouraged a therapeutic environment absent from prejudice towards rape survivors.

A triage system in which the worst victimized are given the best treatment would be the most beneficial; however, counter-intuitively we have a history of blaming the victims for bad situations and a tend to blame victims harsher when the victim experiences more severe than minor difficulties—even when the victims are not particularly irresponsible (Adams-Price, Dalton, & Sumrall 2004). This 2004 study not only discussed the history of victim blaming, but also revealed age stratification. To reach this conclusion, Adams-Price et al. (2004) evaluated 145 adults in 3 age groups, from 18 to 84, whom read 4 scenarios such as accidents, embedded in other scenarios. The results suggested that older participants were prone to blaming victims more than were other younger groups.

Echoing Moor’s (2007) encouragement of reducing prejudice in therapeutic environments, Gill (2009) suggested disclosure of sexual abuse would increase if the victim’s communities reduce or circumvent condemnation. Gill stated that:
Sociocultural expectations, reinforced by conservative religious and patriarchal values, often cause [Britain’s South Asian woman population] to feel unable to challenge these norms: silencing women’s voices, and denying them opportunities to speak about their experiences in their own words, denies them opportunities for resisting their subjugation. (Gill 2009)

When a culture condemns victims, the victims are more likely to suffer in silence instead of reporting abuses.
Similar to the findings from Britain’s East Asian female population, Simone Maciejewski’s 2002 dissertation examined Japanese and European women’s rape disclosure to police. Apparently, Japanese women were less likely to disclose rape to the police than were the European women. This study suggested that complex social and cultural contextual factors differentiated the two groups of women (Maciejewski 2002).

Researching the difference between ethnic groups, Devas & Rubin (2007) compared rape myth acceptance between European American women and first- & second-generation South Asian American women. Devas and Rubin used a variety of scales and questionnaires of which indicated that first generation South Asian American women accepted rape myths more than second generation South Asian American and European women. The second generation Asian Americans and European American women accepted rape myths at corresponding rates.
Similarly, Mori, Bernat, Glenn, Selle, et al. (1995) examined 302 Asian and Caucasian college students for gender and ethnic differences in attitudes towards rape through a variety of questionnaires. The findings indicated significant differences including Asians being more likely than Caucasians to endorse negative attitudes towards rape victims while being more accepting of rape myths. Higher acculturated Asian subjects significantly differed from those with lower acculturation. The researchers suggested a need for specialized rape prevention.
Also comparing Asian and Caucasian college students, Lee, Pomeroy, Yoo, & Rheinboldt (2005) tested attitudes towards rape. The findings suggested that Asian students have a higher tendency to hold women responsible for rape prevention and to view sex as the main motivator for rape. Asians were also more prone to blame the victim of rape and believe rapists were more likely strangers.

Interestingly, while previously stated studies have found a higher tendency for Asians to blame victims more, Nagayama, Gordon, Windover, & Maramba (1998) found that sexual aggression is relatively low in Asian Americans. The researchers suggest that Asian Americans are not as likely to develop developmental, motivational, and situational risk factors related to sexual aggression. Asian culture emphasis on self-control may serve as a protective function against sexual aggression; however, corresponding to the already mentioned studies, the researchers also discussed the issue that patriarchal aspects of Asian culture may increase sexual aggressiveness. Overall, according to Henning & Holdford (2006), male domestic violence offenders often downplay their aggression or transfer blame to their partner; therefore, obtaining correct self-reports is difficult because of these distortions. Men prone to significant denial are less compliant with treatment. Nagayama (1998) suggested that counteractive interventions against patriarchal aspects will likely reduce risks.

According to William George and Lorraine Martinez’s (2002) initial predictions, racial factors seemed to determine victim blaming. These researchers communicated how black sexuality stereotypes foster hypotheses of which racial factors and racism influence blaming rape victims; therefore, they used the Modern Racism Scale for 332 predominantly White and Asian college students who then evaluated a rape vignette with varying victim race, perpetrator race, and race type. Interracial rapes were less uniformly judged as “definitely rape” when compared to interracial rapes. Interracial rapes were also judged as having more culpable and less credible victims with less culpable perpetrators (George & Martinez 2002).

As stated, both ethnicity and gender seem to play significant roles in abuse and victim blaming. Moreover, Adams-Price (2004) suggested age gradients with older groups being more prone to victim blaming. Acculturation, therefore, seems a likely candidate for at least one cause of victim blaming. We find evidence in Cowan & Campbell’s (1995) examination of attitudes about possible causes of rape in 453 Black, Asian, Hispanic, and White high school adolescents by supplying a questionnaire. The results demonstrated that the females were more likely to attribute male pathology as a cause of rape while the males were more prone to associating female precipitation. The findings suggested that attitudes about the causes of rape related to gender, ethnicity, age, and communication sources about rape.

Based on the literature review, I suspect that research findings from further research would show slightly higher victim-blaming responses for Korean groups than for Caucasian Canadians groups. Results would likely show a high to low distribution in the order of Korean, Korean Canadian, Canadian Korean, and Canadian. Diverging from the discussed literature review, we may see findings that suggest that language influences Koreans and Canadians to blame victims in different scenarios.

Males of all groups will probably blame victims more than the females; however, the younger groups of all groups may very well be the least likely. The responses to the questions may show a pattern of traditional and modern culture influencing attitudes differently with the more traditional attitudes being higher in victim blaming tendencies.

I must add a caveat that this research is not meant as a means by which to find differences between ethnicities, only to demonstrate how attributing blame to victims is a learned behavior and may be reduced with different acculturation. The literature review seems to have a pattern of an Asian disposition for blaming victims; however, I have a concern that there could be at least a few confounding variables within the research. One confounding variable might be the language used by subjects. If language shapes the way we think on issues, earlier research may have influenced subjects by using a survey only in one language. My approach would be to use bilingual surveys and researchers in trying to reduce this potential problem.

Also, not included, but should also be kept in mind, is the difference between overt and covert victim blaming. We might see that Koreans are more likely to verbally and overtly blame a victim; however, Canadians may be more likely to commit to more covert victim blaming. In all likeliness, tendencies for blaming victims and abuse itself may be reduced by a mixing of cultural strategies and influences. We can see evidence for that in Nagayama’s (1998) study of Asian American men who were less likely for abuse.

The differences that we do see will be largely based on cultural factors. I doubt that any ethnic group is more inclined to blaming victims on a genetic or biological level. For Koreans, I suspect that traditional Confucian culture, with its strict social hierarchy of the males at the top and the females at the bottom, may encourage blaming victims. In contrast, Canadians are more diverse and have a longer history of social reform campaigns educating the population about rape e.g., “No means no!”. Because of these awareness campaigns, Canadians may state answers that do not blame the victim; however, they may non-consciously blame victims in real-life situations.

If this research can demonstrate that some ethnic groups are more liable than others to blaming victims and that through diaspora those tendencies change, we will have evidence that victim blaming is largely a result of acculturation; therefore, we will be able to implement strategies that can educate people to inoculate irrational thought patterns. If victim blaming is not static, but is instead dynamic, we might be able to mix cultural strategies until people are less likely to falsely attribute blame. This would allow victims feel safe to disclose abuses, allow the victims to receive help, and ward them against secondary victimization.

References

Adams-Price, C.E., Dalton, W., Sumrall, R., (2004). Victim Blaming in Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults: Variations on the Severity Effect. Journal of Adult Development, 11(4), 289-295.

Carli, L.L. (1999). Cognitive reconstruction, hindsight, and reactions to victims and perpetrators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 966-979.

Cowan, G., Campbell, R.R., (1995). Rape causal attitudes among adolescents. Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality US. Journal of Sex Research, 32(2), 145-153.

Devdas, N., Rubin, L., (2007). Rape Myth Acceptance Among First- and Second-Generation South Asian American Women. Sex Roles, (9-10), 701-705.

George, W.H., Martinez, L.J., (2002). Victim blaming in rape: Effects of victim and perpetrator race, type of rape, and participant racism. Blackwell Publishing United Kingdom. Psychology of Women Quarterly, (2), 110-119.

Gill, A. (2009) Narratives of survival: South Asian women's experience of rape. Willan Publishing. United Kingdom, 161-183.

Henning, K., Holdford, R., (2006). Minimization, Denial, and Victim Blaming by Batterers: How Much Does the Truth Matter? Sage Publications US. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 33(1) 110-130.

Kent, G. (2003). "Blaming the Victim, Globally". UN Chronicle online (United Nations Department of Public Information) XL (3). Archived from the original on Dec 24, 2003. http://web.archive.org/web/20031224033005/http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2003/issue3/0303p59.asp.

Lerner, M.J., Simmons, C. H., (1966) Observer's reaction to the "innocent victim": Compassion or rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 4(2), Aug 1966, 203-210.

Lee, J., Pomeroy, E.C., Yoo, S.K., Rheinboldt, K.T., (2005). Attitudes Toward Rape: A Comparison Between Asian and Caucasian College Students. Sage Publications US. Violence Against Women, (2), 177-196.

Maciejewski, S.I., (2002). Cultural influence on reporting rape to police: A comparison of Japanese American women and European American women. ProQuest Information & Learning US. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, (5-B), 2592.

Moor, A., (2007). When recounting the traumatic memories is not enough: Treating persistent self-devaluation associated with rape and victim-blaming rape myths. Haworth Press US. Women; Therapy, (1-2), 19-33.

Mori, L., Bernat, J.A., Glenn, P.A., Selle, L.L., et al. (1995). Attitudes toward rape: Gender and ethnic differences across Asian and Caucasian college students. Springer Germany. Sex Roles, (7-8), 457-467.

Nagayama H., Gordon, C., Windover, A.K., Maramba, G. (1998). Sexual Aggression Among Asian Americans: Risk and Protective Factors. Cultural Diversity & Mental Health, (4), 305-318.