She's So Oppressed by Adversity That...: Now, Just TRY Grasping That

Philosophically, victim-blaming can be rationalized by Aristotle’s claim that some people are slaves by nature because they appear to accept the condition of servitude. Just as it appeared to Aristotle that there are “natural” slaves [see his Politics], so too it appears to very many people in the United States at this time that those who, like battered women, are in violent relationships, or live in dire poverty, or fall into crippling mental illness, or are chronically unemployed, or are drug addicts or alcoholics, etc. are in these conditions because of some flaw in their “nature.”....

Like Aristotle, people today who blame victims seem unable to grasp that a person, though free, can nevertheless be so oppressed by adversity that she accepts her servitude, her oppression. In other words, victim-blaming, while ostensibly affirming the freedom of victims to reject their condition, in fact denies freedom by attributing to victims an inherent flaw namely Aristotle’s weakness of will, or more contemporaneously, lack of will power. Thus, the allegation of akrasia enables the one who blames the victim to deny the terrible reality that only the free can be, and are, enslaved or otherwise victimized. If one has an inherent flaw, then to that extent one is not free.

--Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Ph.D., LCSW,

“Toward a Visionary Politics,”

in Philosophy, Feminism, and Faith