When I was writing Blaming The Victim--25 years ago---there were, I now realize, two issues on my mind that have been nagging at me every since.The first of these is equality, or rather inequality. The process that I called-----perhaps too glibly---blaming the victim is a way of justifying inequalities that appear on their face to be quite unjustifiable. If, for example, existing extremes of wealth and poverty seem to be blatant violations of simple justice, a moral person cannot simply ignore the injustice. If such extremes of inequality are allowed to exist, there must be some justification, some received wisdom, some explanation that will appease the conscience of a decent person. Blaming the victim serves just such a purpose; first, by finding defects and deficiencies in the poor themselves, and then, more important, concluding that these discovered defects are the cause of poverty. Presto Chango! Extreme poverty is no longer an instance of social injustice. It now becomes the inevitable consequence of the characteristics and behavior of the poor themselves. The notion that poverty is caused by the incompetence, laziness, or wickedness of poor persons seem quite plausible. It is made even more plausible when close observation reveals that many poor persons are, indeed, incompetent, or lazy, or wicked. (As are many who are not poor, of course.)At this point, the search for understanding ceases abruptly. No further inquiry seems necessary, no examination of the circumstances, of the social and economic systems, of the wage scale, or the employment situation, and so forth. The personal explanation renders any structural explanation irrelevant.This readiness to believe was the second issue that nagged at me. It was not so clear-cut as the first. It had to do somehow with the style of one's thinking, such as, for example, a preference for explanations that fo-25 0091--0562/94/0200-0025507.0o/0 9 1994 Plenum Publishing Corporation
