It's Never the Victim's Fault: Victim Blaming, Abuse, and Sexual Assault
by Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW
*I will be referring to the victim as a woman in this blog, but I am speaking of all genders. Please replace whatever gender is appropriate when I refer to the perpetrator and the victim.
To the victims: It was not your fault because of what you were wearing. It was not your fault because you had been drinking, or because you went back, or because you stayed. It was not your fault because you said something sharp in an argument, or because you didn’t scream, or fight, or leave the first time. It was not your fault because of who you loved, married, worked for, or trusted. It was not your fault because of your past, your reputation, or the names someone chose to call you afterward. It is not your fault because someone said it. You are the victim.
Abuse is abuse. The person who was harmed is the victim. Always.
I wish that were obvious. Yet over and over, the spotlight is on the person who was hurt instead of the person who chose to hurt them. We pick apart the victim’s choices, her clothing, her tone, her timing, her text messages, as if somewhere in those details we might find a reason the harm was deserved. There is no such reason. There never has been.
Abuse Wears Many Faces
When people hear the word “abuse,” many picture bruises. Physical violence is real and devastating, but it is only one form. Sexual violence, including assault by a partner, a spouse, a date, a relative, or someone the victim trusted, is abuse. Coercive control is abuse, too: the slow, deliberate tightening of someone’s world through monitoring, isolation from friends and family, control of money, threats, humiliation, and ever-changing rules that keep a person off balance and afraid. Emotional, psychological, and financial abuse can leave no visible marks at all, yet they can rewire a person’s sense of safety and self-worth for years.
The absence of a bruise is not the absence of harm. And the presence of love, history, marriage, or children does not make abuse anything other than what it is.
What Denim Day Teaches Us
In 1992, an 18-year-old girl in Italy was raped by her driving instructor. He was convicted. But in 1998, Italy’s highest court overturned that conviction. The reasoning? The young woman had been wearing tight jeans, and the judges concluded she must have helped her attacker remove them, which, they decided, implied consent.
Read that again. A conviction for rape was thrown out because of a pair of jeans.
The outrage was immediate. The next day, women in the Italian Parliament came to work wearing jeans in solidarity with the survivor. The following year, Peace Over Violence, right here in Los Angeles, launched the first Denim Day in the United States. Today it is observed every April, during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, by people around the world who wear denim as a visible statement that there is no outfit, no behavior, and no circumstance that equals consent. I went to Los Angeles to observe Denim Day last April. It was an incredible experience.
Denim Day matters because that court’s reasoning wasn’t unusual. It simply said out loud what so many people quietly believe: that a victim must have done something to invite what happened. Every time we wear denim, we reject that belief. Every day we should be rejecting it in how we listen, how we vote, how we raise our children, and how we respond when someone finds the courage to tell us the truth.
We Keep Asking the Wrong Person the Wrong Questions
“Why didn’t she just leave?” “What was she wearing?” “Why did she wait so long to say something?” “Wasn’t she drinking?”
These questions all point at the victim. Notice how rarely we ask the questions that actually matter: Why did he choose to harm her? Who knew and looked away? Why did the people around him protect him? What made him believe he would get away with it?
It can help to understand where victim-blaming comes from. Sometimes it grows out of a wish to feel safe. If we can convince ourselves that bad things only happen to people who make “mistakes,” then we can believe it will never happen to us or to the people we love. Blaming the victim protects the onlooker’s comfort, not the truth.
I offer that only as understanding, never as an excuse. Victim-blaming is not okay. Not ever. Explaining where it comes from does not make it acceptable, and it does not lessen the damage it does. There is no innocent bystander here. Every time we question a victim instead of the person who hurt her, every time we stay silent, look away, or laugh along, we become part of the system that allows abuse to continue. Society is guilty of letting this happen, and that includes all of us who have stayed quiet when we could have spoken.
For a survivor, being blamed can feel like being harmed all over again. She came forward hoping for safety and instead was met with doubt, judgment, or silence. Many survivors tell no one for years because they have watched how others were treated when they did. If you have been blamed, disbelieved, or shamed, I want you to know that the failure belonged to the people who responded, not to you. Your pain was real, your story was worthy of being heard, and you deserved so much better.
“Stop Teaching Women Not to Be Raped. Teach Men Not to Rape.”
I have seen this message on social media lately. Instead of teaching women how not to be raped, we should be teaching men not to rape.
Think about how strange it is that we ever got this backward. As if a person can be taught not to be raped. As if the right outfit, the right route home, the right drink order, or the right amount of caution could prevent someone else from choosing to commit a violent act. Women are handed endless lists of rules: don’t walk alone, watch your drink, text when you get home, don’t dress like that, don’t lead anyone on. And when something terrible happens anyway, those same rules are turned into a checklist of everything she supposedly did wrong.
The only person who can prevent a rape is the person who chooses whether or not to commit one. So that is where our teaching belongs. We need to raise boys and men who understand consent, who respect a “no” and know that silence, hesitation, intoxication, or a past relationship is never a “yes.” We need men who call out other men, who refuse to laugh at the jokes, and who understand that real strength means never taking what was not freely given. We must teach empathy. Survivors of every gender deserve this, and so do the boys we are raising right now.
Abuse happens to survivors of every gender, every age, every background, and every income level. No one is immune, and no one is to blame for being targeted.
Why So Many Abusers Go Unpunished
It is heartbreaking, and infuriating, how often people who abuse face no consequences at all. There are many reasons, and none of them have to do with the victim deserving what happened.
Most abuse is never reported. Of the cases that are, many never move forward. When they do, it is often the victim whose credibility is put on trial: her history, her relationships, her mental health, her delay in coming forward. Abuse usually happens behind closed doors, without witnesses, and that privacy is exactly what an abuser counts on.
We also misunderstand how trauma works. A survivor may remember events in fragments or out of order. She may speak about the worst moment of her life in a flat, detached voice, or she may laugh nervously, or she may not be able to find the words at all. These are normal responses of a nervous system that has been overwhelmed. Too often, they are misread as signs of dishonesty.
Meanwhile, many abusers are charming in public. They may have money, status, community standing, and good lawyers. Institutions such as workplaces, schools, churches, sports teams, and even families frequently close ranks to protect a reputation rather than a person. Legal processes can be slow, expensive, and retraumatizing. Statutes of limitations can expire before a survivor is ready to speak. Plea deals and light sentences send a painful message about whose suffering counts. And in many places, coercive control is still not recognized as a crime at all.
None of this is the victim’s failure. It is society’s and we need to fix it.
Why Coming Forward Can Feel So Unsafe
When someone asks why a survivor didn’t speak up sooner, I wish they could feel, even for a moment, what she was weighing.
She may fear that no one will believe her. She may fear retaliation, for herself, her children, or her pets. She may depend on the abuser for housing, income, health insurance, or immigration security. She may worry about losing custody, her job, her friends, her faith community, or her family’s support. She may have been told for years that it was her fault, until part of her believed it. She may dread having to relive the most painful experience of her life in front of strangers, police officers, attorneys, or a courtroom, and in today’s world, possibly in front of the entire internet.
If you are carrying a story you have never told, please be gentle with yourself. Staying quiet may have been how you survived, and there is no shame in that. You were doing the very best you could in an impossible situation, with whatever strength and safety you had at the time.
Silence is not consent. Delay is not deception. Many survivors disclose months, years, or even decades later, and that is a normal part of how people process trauma. A story told late is still true.
Coming Forward Protects More Than One Person
People who abuse rarely do it only once. When a survivor speaks up, she may be protecting not only herself but the next partner, the next coworker, the next child, the next person who would have been harmed. Some of the most important changes in our laws and institutions began because one person was brave enough to say, “This happened to me,” and others found the courage to say, “Me too.”
And yet I want to be very careful here. No survivor owes the world her story. The responsibility for keeping people safe does not belong to the person who was hurt. It belongs to all of us. Whether, when, and how a survivor comes forward is her decision alone. Coming forward can mean filing a police report, but it can also mean telling one trusted friend, reaching out to an advocate, speaking with a therapist, or writing the truth in a journal for no one else to read. Every one of those steps counts.
Building a Safer World, Together
If we want survivors to feel safe enough to come forward, we have to become people and communities who are safe to come forward to. That starts with believing them. When someone tells you they were hurt, lead with “I believe you,” and “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” not with questions about what they did.
It means speaking up when we hear jokes or comments that blame victims. It means holding people accountable even when we like them, work with them, or are related to them. It means supporting the advocacy organizations, shelters, and legal services that walk with survivors every day, and supporting laws that recognize all forms of abuse, including coercive control. It means showing up for a survivor in practical ways: sitting beside her in a courtroom, driving her to an appointment, or simply listening without judgment. And it means teaching our children, early and often, about consent and body autonomy: that they have the right to say no, and that they must always respect someone else’s no.
Perpetrators should not be allowed to get away with their crime. A safer world is one where the shame finally lands where it belongs, on the person who caused the harm.
To Every Survivor:
You are not what was done to you. You did not cause it, you could not have prevented it by being quieter, smaller, or more careful, and you do not have to carry it alone. Whatever you said, whatever you wore, whatever you did or didn’t do, you were and are the victim of someone else’s choice. You deserve to be believed. You deserve safety. You deserve justice. And you deserve healing, in your own time and in your own way.
If You Need Support
If you are in immediate danger, please call 911.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673
National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: 988
About the Author: Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker who has been a psychotherapist for nearly 40 years. She developed the "Traitor Within" framework to help people name and understand the repetitive self-sabotage that shows up in their adult lives. She is the host of the podcast Your Traitor Within, author of Your Traitor Within: A Year of Journaling Prompts for Healing and Empowerment, and author of her debut novel, Traitor Within — How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Her to Abandon Herself.
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