Louise O'Neill: The impulse to blame victims can act as a form of self-protection
'As a sober 36-year-old woman, I marvel at my… carelessness? Bravery?'
When I turned 30, I wrote a blog post saying farewell to my 20s, detailing some of the stupid things I had done when I was younger.
Drunkenly stumbling out of the Trinity Ball after I’d lost my friends, barefoot, and following a man I met on the street without another thought. Taking money to get a taxi to Brooklyn at 2am — “it’s not safe at this hour of the night,” my aunt said — but I pocketed the cash and got the subway instead.
Going to a stranger’s house after a nightclub because he promised there would be drink and pills there, and when he walked towards me brandishing a knife, I thought, ‘this is where it ends’. (He just wanted to cut the VIP band off my wrist.)
My mother told me never to walk home after a night out, she’d pick me up no matter how late it was. Instead, I would set a timer on my phone to see how fast I could run up our hill in high heels. I hitched rides with strangers while on J1 and again, when spending a summer in Spain. Once, when the bulimia was very bad, I ran alongside a motorway in Spain to get to a petrol station to buy food to binge on.
There was no footpath so I ran in the ditch in the pitch black, hoping that the cars roaring past wouldn’t swerve suddenly.
I have many anecdotes like these. Some were related to my eating disorder, and how little value I placed upon my well-being. Others were because I was too drunk or high and I made bad choices. But others still were part being young and impulsive, the sort of young woman who craved adventure, who would say yes to anything if I thought it would make for a good story to tell afterwards.
Now, as a sober 36-year-old woman, I marvel at my… carelessness? Bravery? It’s hard to know what to call it. But I’m glad that I was able to make my mistakes and I survived.
But imagine if one of those nights had ended in tragedy. If the man with the knife had wanted to hurt me. If a car had stopped on the Spanish motorway that night and I was dragged inside. What would have been said about me? What was she thinking? What was she doing out alone? She should have known better. It wouldn’t have mattered that I was a person with hopes and dreams, with ambitions I hadn’t realised yet.
That I was a human being who could be kind and selfish, who could be smart and make stupid decisions. Someone who didn’t really know what they were doing and needed time and space to figure it out.
Laura Bates, the activist and author of the seminal book, Men Who Hate Women, wrote this after Ashling Murphy’s killing. “I understand why people are posting ‘she was going for a run’,” Bates shared on Instagram. “I get why ’she was just walking home’ and ‘she did all the right things’ trended after Sarah Everard died. I know it comes from a place of grief and rage. But it doesn’t matter what they were doing. When we say, ‘she was just doing this’ or ‘she was just doing that’, it suggests that the case wouldn’t have been quite so awful or tragic if she had been doing something else.
“Like if she was walking down an alleyway at 2am or going to meet her married lover or a sex work client or if she was drunk or she had taken drugs… like it would be a little bit less awful in those circumstances. And it devalues women’s lives. It plays into this insidious narrative of the perfect victim who deserves our sympathy and our grief because she did absolutely everything right.
“She didn’t deserve it. Of course she f**king didn’t. But when we say that, no matter how unintentional, there’s a tiny, unsaid implication that some women do deserve it. A tiny reinforcement of the rules that bind us so tightly we can’t breathe, because if we step outside of them, we know people will think we deserved our own deaths. A tiny little dehumanisation on top of a million other tiny cuts. It doesn’t matter what she was doing. It doesn’t matter. She shouldn’t be dead.”
I think the impulse to find some way to blame victims is firstly rooted in misogyny, but I also think it can act as a form of self-protection. We want to believe that we have some control over our lives, that if we take certain steps — don’t walk alone at night, get a taxi home, text your friends to let them know you’re OK — that we can avoid danger. It’s the same impulse that makes people say, “I wouldn’t put up with that” and “I’d leave if it were me” when talking about a woman trapped in an abusive marriage.
Because if we actually sat with the reality of this world, the sheer number of women who are abused and assaulted and raped and murdered every day, we would have to come to terms with how close that violence is to us every waking minute.
We would have to accept that we could, like Ashling Murphy, do everything right, and it still wouldn’t be enough.
