Study Shows Victim-Blaming is Still a Trend Among Women.

This study performed in London finds that a larger percentage of women feel that women should take responsibility for when they have been raped and the circumstances that caused the rape.

One third felt that provocative dress or returning to the attacker’s house to have a drink makes a victim deserving of some blame for the rape, according to the survey, which was reported by BBC News.
The online survey of more than 1,000 people in London, called Wake Up To Rape, found that more than half of both men and women said that in some instances, the victim should take responsibility for a rape. The survey participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 50, included 712 men and 349 men, according to BBC News.
Some 71 percent of the women who said they felt some rape victims should take responsibility said the victims were accountable for the crime if they’d gone to bed with the attacker. Only 57 percent of the men felt that way, according to the survey.

Well we already know that victim-blaming is a no-no and not just because it is unfair, but because it doesn’t take into consideration the ways that attitudes on rape and women’s sexuality are full of assumptions about the ways women are supposed to “preserve” their own sexuality and assumptions that certain men just “act that way” so it is on us to protect ourselves from their potential inclination to rape. Victim-blaming fails to take into consideration the role that negative attitudes on women’s sexuality shape predominant understandings of rape.
But sadly, this study doesn’t surprise me. Fear of sexual assault has forced women in many instances to internalize negative assumptions about their own sexuality. It is hard to suggest that woman are uniquely more sexist than men but perhaps they have internalized the belief that to protect themselves from rape they have to act and dress a certain way to avoid the potential threat. So while this attitude smacks of victim-blaming, part of why a study would show that a disproportionate number of women feel that women are to blame is because they believe on some level, they might be to blame for their own potential assault, a narrative that sexism has embedded into the heads of women. This is not to suggest that women shouldn’t be held accountable for unjust attitudes on sexual assault, but instead to find an explanation for why women would believe such a depressing myth.