Talk:Victim blaming

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Is there any reason this concept should not be treated as an instance of the Just-world phenomenon, and its article merged? They seem quite closely related. --Soultaco 17:39, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

  • If anything, I'd suggest it be the other way around. In all my reading, I've never seen the term "Just-world phenomenon", whereas "Blaming..." is widely used. In addition, "Blaming..." speaks more to the practical consequences of this (untenable) position. Twang 01:18, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
    • But even each of the links on this page referring to victim-blaming cite the just world phenomenon; you can also see the entry on same for some more examples. It's well established in the psych literature. Victim blaming strikes me as more of a pop psychology term for one particular instance of the same thing. Are there academic references that make use of the term? --Soultaco 22:18, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
      • You may be correct about the links on this page, Soultaco -- AS IT IS. But then this page isn't in very good shape ... BTV is an idea which has seen a ton of discussion since it first cropped up. I've added just a little history today; the concept was subsequently argued for years.
        The phrase was certainly widely adopted in Education studies and used broadly in the Humanities. (As of today (August 2006), Google lists 335,000 appearances of the phrase. JPW appears 504 times, making BTV 600 times more commonly used.)
        You may be right that it's more of a 'pop psychology' term; in my opinion the articles in WP ought to be given the title that's more familiar. Such an important instance of JWP deserves of it's own page. I suspect that as time goes by this article might become quite long ... depending on whether WP's reputation improves.
        Twang 23:28, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
        • Another view, here... Seems to me that the more academically proper arrangement would be for the pages to given the title that's more technically correct, with the more familiar terms which refer to the concepts simply redirecting to the main page. That way if somebody searches for "Victim blaming" they end up at the more proper "Just-world phenomenon" page and, thus, learn the proper term for it. Just a thought. In any case, I think the issue needs to be resolved, as there is currently an enormous backlog of pages marked for merging. Jaye 17:05, 26 August 2006 (UTC)


Contents

[edit] Not a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The basic "jist" of a self-fulfilling prophecy is where the belief or fear one has about a given person/sitiuation leads to their fear being realised as a result of having it in the first place. I do not see how this in any way relates to victim blaming. In this case we are talking about denial and a need to redirect blame to another party. It does not make the victim actually become the one responsible nor are we talking about something being actualized by the fear of it being true. If anyone can appropriately show how these two terms are in any way related we can restore it, but I think its misleading to make such a connection when one does not appear to exist. Enigmatical 01:56, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

  • The relationship between the two is complicated. It isn't so much cause-and-effect as it is a tug-of-war. Psychologically they're deeply intertwingled. It's like a binary star, where two stars orbit around each other.
    When I find, or think of, a sufficiently clarifying example, I'll be back. Twang 23:37, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
    • So you are admitting yourself that neither requires the other to exist and that the relationship between them only exists if one chooses it to exist. This would clearly indicate to me that there is no need to "see also" as viewing either page does not provide any clarity on the other. If I read the article on SFP and then read Victim blaming I do not go "Ahhh... now I understand what an SFP is better because Victim Blaming helps me understand", nor vice versa. There is absolutely no correlation between the two other than both of them being psychological manifestations which "sometimes" are made together by people who fail to see the truth and have instead chosen to believe their own delusions. Should we then include "See also" links to paranoia, denial and other such articles? Surely these are involved in the "tug-of-war" far more often than an SFP is. Enigmatical 23:44, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sweden

This stuff about Sweden sounds like pure bullshit to me. I'm Swedish and _I've_ never heard anything about this. Unless someone comes up with sources for this about Sweden in the next 24 hours, I'm just gonna edit it away.

Addicted2Sanity 01:57, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Update

Hello.

I removed the unsubstantiated stuff about Sweden, and I also wikified the text more. Hope everyone is happy with the changes - it looks pretty nice to me... :)

Addicted2Sanity 22:42, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unencyclopedic

"Blaming the victim" as a concept is not really any deeper than what it literally says. If you understand the noun "victim" and the verb "to blame", you understand what it means; any further explanation would be nothing more than paraphrase, as in the introductory paragraph of this article. We might as well have an article about "Putting on a hat", complete with an elaborate explanation of the process, wikilinks, a couple pictures, and a brief history of hat-wearing across world cultures.

As a literal expression, "blaming the victim" is little more than a rhetoric device; we could list instances where it has been used, but that would result in an unencyclopedic and sometimes ridiculous article (currently its "History of the idea" suggests that victim-blaming was invented in the 1960s!). It would end up being just a soapbox for people to denounce their favorite injustices, NPOV be damned. --79.23.243.226 (talk) 14:47, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Disagree. Blaming the victim is an important concept that has widespread consequences in a variety of social phenomena, identifying it and taking countermeasures was neither obvious nor trivial, as evidenced by it only happening in '60s; nor is it a finished process. Somehow I don't see you questioning the encyclopaedicity of flour, even though everyone knows what flour is. mathrick (talk) 14:58, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
I wouldn't question "victim" or "blame", either, provided something encyclopedic were written about them (the article on blame is not that great, for instance). I would, however, oppose an article titled "Mixing flour with water"; and I would only accept "Flour manufacturing" if we had so much material about it that it could not be included as a section in the article on flour. In the case of this article, all we have are some assorted facts and opinions that would fit better under other entries: for example, the article on rape already has its own section on victim blaming.
If you think you can write an encyclopedic treatment of the very concept of blaming the victim, by all means do try, although it's not going to be a small job (you'd have to start way farther back than the 1960s!). And beware of OR. --79.23.243.226 (talk) 15:14, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
So, according to your logic, any two-words compound phrase is unencyclopaedic, because you can figure it out from the constituent words. The exact same argument could be made for, say, erectile dysfunction. Your objection is silly and I'm editing it away from the article. mathrick (talk) 17:49, 12 December 2007 (UTC)