Victim blaming
Children and young people report that sometimes when they tell adults about their experiences of abuse, adults can ask questions or say things that make the children and young people feel like the abuse is their fault, or that they are being accused of lying. Some examples of this might be, ‘Was your dad so angry because you’d stayed out late?’, or ‘Your dad always seems so nice when he comes in to school, I’m sure he didn’t mean to scare you’. For young people experiencing abuse in their own relationships, it might be questions about why the victim has sent the perpetrator intimate images, or comments about the young person hanging out with the ‘wrong kind of people’. This is called victim blaming.
Victim blaming happens because people take comfort in the thought that bad things can be avoided, and if something bad has happened to someone, there must be a reason for it.[i] Victims often blame themselves for their experiences too. It is important that, when receiving disclosures of domestic abuse, adults take great care to not blame the victim or insinuate that any part of the experience was their fault. This only serves to make it less likely that a child or young person will disclose again, either to you or to other adults in their life. It can be very helpful for a child or young person to hear an adult tell them that what happened was not their .
[i] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kent-Harber/publication/274010621_Emotional_Disclosure_and_Victim_Blaming/links/5a11a80a458515cc5aa98cba/Emotional-Disclosure-and-Victim-Blaming.pdf
