The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators, and Responsibility

By Sharon Lamb

Book Overview

Blame society. Blame a bad upbringing. Blame the circumstances. Blame the victim--she may even blame herself. But what about the perpetrator? When the blame is all assigned, will anyone be left to take responsibility?

This powerful book takes up the disturbing topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators? How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves? How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions? And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?

With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses, and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency--and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing, and reparation. She shows how the current practice of painting victims as pure innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing.

The Trouble with Blame clarifies the social cost (quickly becoming so apparent) of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of over-emphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our dire need for accountability and recovery.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674910117
• ISBN13: 9780674910119
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A much needed wake-up call to a culture in trouble.

It's about time someone held the guilt and shame avoidance of our culture up to the light; an avoidance that leads to excusing irresponsible behavior on the one hand and taking on responsibilities that are not rightfully one's own on the other. The subject has been written about at length elsewhere concerning: the irresponsible alcoholic and their overly responsible spouse, the criminals who get off with the flimsiest of excuses based in third-rate science (recall the Twinkie defense), the abusive spouse and the battered wife who will not leave him, the poorly behaved child and his ineffective parents, etc., etc. But no one has gotten a handle on these issues to the degree Sharon Lamb has. Lamb is dealing with the same issue that Deborah Tannen has taken on in her latest book The Argument Culture : Moving from Debate to Dialogue. Tannen points out that we polarize everything believing that the truth can come out only if we represent opposing views. Making dialog! ue into a win/lose debating contest. Thus a well thought out, balanced view might be opposed by a partisan view which will acknowledge no value in the balanced view and seek only to defeat it. The unwillingness of the partisan to recognize or understand the view of the other and to deliberately distort the meaning and motivations of the other just in order to win is similar to what perpetrators do to rob victims of their point of view and credibility. Perhaps the most important insight (one among many) offered here is that we must stop requiring total innocence on the part of victims before we can hold perpetrators accountable. James Hillman, in Pan and the Nightmare, characterized rape as the overwhelming of the higher by the lower. In this sense rape is epidemic in our day. One cannot help but feel that our culture is out order, perhaps becoming a sick culture, out of touch with what it is to be human. Lamb's book is a powerful statement that human is more than we r! ecognize in our court rooms or psychiatric clinics. This b! ook should be read by anyone concerned with the state of our society.