Centre for Gender and Violence Research Seminar (Free to attend)

Seminar 7: A feature, not a bug: The ‘new’ victim blame

Online event 13:00-13:50 GMT

This is a free event. Joining details will be sent to you upon registration.

Speakers:

Dr Amy Beddows, Edinburgh Napier University

My PhD research showed that victim blame is an inadequate concept for understanding societal responses towards women who have experienced violence (Beddows, 2022).

As well as blamed, women felt judged, disrespected, and objectified by professionals across a range of agencies and sectors. They also felt that these responses were a reaction to who they were (their gender, age, sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, ability) more than their experiences of men’s violence.
Victimism – reducing women to the restrictive status of ‘victim’ (Barry, 1979) – and responsibilisation (Rose, 2000) – making women solely responsible for recovering from and preventing men’s violence – are more useful concepts for
understanding the harmful ways that agencies respond to survivors.

These processes are enacted through different aspects of practice: individual staff; policies and processes; physical environments; reputations and expectations.
These processes maintain the status quo by keeping focus and accountability on victims rather than perpetrators, professionals, or systems; therefore, they should be understood as a feature, rather than a bug, of patriarchal
societies.

Creating space for survivors – space for action, spaces to speak, and spaces to be and be with – can challenge negative messages and instead communicate
respect, dig

To book click here