Blaming the Victim

1
Blaming the Victim

• Moving beyond the individual to contextual
  influences on dysfunction

2
Origins of Blaming the Victim

• Term originated by William Ryan
• part of the 60s zeitgeist
• Mainly focused on race
• Book was a reactionary stance to prevailing
  individual-deficit ideology
• Arthur Jensen
• Moynihan report
• Swung the pendulum in the opposite direction

3
How do you do it?

• Identify a social problem
• Study those affected by the problem and discover
  in what ways they are different
• Define the differences as the cause of the social
  problem itself

4
Why do you do it?

• General Inaccurate assumptions
• Examples
• College Admissions
• Poverty
• Housing
• Academic Achievement
• No Child Left Behind (NCLB) fallacy
• Just World Hypothesis
• Fundamental Attribution Error

5
Just World Hypothesis

• The world is just and fair
• Bad things do not happen randomly
• When bad things happen there must be a reason
• Therefore if I do not have a reason for bad
  things to happen to me they wont

6
Fundamental Attribution Error

• Tendency to attribute behavior to faults in the
  individual versus elements of the situation
• This person behaved badly because they are a bad
  person
• I am not a bad person so I wont behave that way

7
Savage Discovery in the Schools

• Cultural Deprivation
• Coleman Report
• Restatement of the problems
• Misinterpretation of causality
• Bias in evidence
• Manipulation of data
• Information about contextual issues
• Vocabulary knowledge

8
Alternative Explanations

• Teacher bias
• Organizational issues
• Systemic Issues
• NCLB
• Inclusion