A recent symposium on the challenges of providing psychotherapy in times of political violence highlighted the need for greater recognition of the commonalities across structural inequalities.
In recent years, the weight of the sociopolitical contexts within which psychotherapy clients exist has demanded greater acknowledgement in the therapy room; clients speak of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, of Brexit, climate change, the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis as intensely as their individual experiences of trauma, oppression, violence and loss. The world feels like a less hopeful place, and this makes therapy more challenging, with increasing pressure to work towards social change as well as alleviate the distress of those we see day to day.
The symposium addressed a cross-section of societal inequalities: poverty, forced displacement, racism and coloniality, misogyny (and complicated masculinities), transphobia. Exploring these minoritised identities under the umbrella of therapeutic practice illustrated stark similarities within the ways that professionals, agencies and systems respond to these typically siloed social issues, especially in terms of the processes which reinforce and maintain prejudice and inequity.
Through my own research into women’s experiences of victim blame, it is apparent that more complex processes are in play than merely blaming victims of violence. After speaking about rape and abuse, women were objectified, disrespected and dehumanised by professionals on account of their gender, age, sexuality, race and ethnicity, ability and class more than because they were victims of men’s violence. Rather than being seen as whole people with multiple needs and identities, women were reduced to the one-dimensional, stigmatised status of ‘victim’, a status which comes with strict criteria – women must be credible, respectable, compliant and grateful – which can only be granted by relevant authorities such as police or psychiatrists. Simultaneously, responsibility for prevention and management of social issues like gendered violence is placed upon the individuals most affected more than on the organisations and systems that allow it to happen. When gendered violence is acknowledged, women are made fully responsible for their recovery, for obtaining justice and moving forward with their lives, as well as for preventing men’s future violence (by engaging with a degrading, traumatising and ineffective criminal justice process).
However, these patterns of dehumanisation and responsibilisation are not limited to sexual violence and by focusing on highly specific concepts, such as victim blame, we are missing a much bigger picture of inequalities and oppression. For example, people and communities affected by poverty are reduced to ‘benefit claimants’ or ‘scroungers’, whose financial needs must be authorised by professionals under the assertion that their situation is purely the result of bad personal choices. Any attempts to destabilise this disparagement of individuals is dismissed and silenced as ‘nanny statism’. The same can be seen for people displaced through conflict, political oppression or natural disaster: they are reduced to ‘asylum seekers’ or criminalised as ‘illegal’ migrants, then responsibilised through demands that they leave their homes or countries in the ‘right’ way – regardless of the avenues open to them – and present as perfect, deserving refugees (which recent rhetoric suggests means white, Christian and European). If people are granted refugee status, they are expected to be grateful for extremely limited and hostile support that locates them far from families or communities. This pattern repeats through professional and mainstream reactions to gender identities, classism, ability and disability, race and ethnicity, religion, culture and sexualities.
These dehumanising processes are manifestations of neoliberal ideologies which dismiss social issues by centring them as purely problems with individuals, thus shifting criticism and responsibility away from structural and systemic failings. When understood in this way, we can see that processes like victim blame and responsibilisation are intentional features rather than bugs in a system which protects itself from threat by shifting criticism onto the individuals it fails to safeguard.
Why does this matter? Naming and calling out the machinations by which the status quo is reinforced and reinforces itself would allow us to start dismantling the inequalities within each stratum of society. Responses like victimism and responsibilisation are defining features of patriarchy, white supremacy and gender inequality and therefore major stumbling blocks to any genuine attempts at ‘levelling up’. Siloing the social processes which keep people trapped by poverty or in the limbo of displacement through warfare or famine, or which oppress individuals based on gender, ethnicity, race or culture, also prevents us from seeing how these inequalities are deeply interlinked and intersectional; we cannot meaningfully tackle one without addressing another. Otherwise, we end up playing an ineffectual game of whack-a-mole, responding to a single issue which will only emerge in other, more covert forms. As a society, we have called out victim blame and that does seem to have had a cooling effect on the direct blame lobbied at victims of sexual violence; however, women are still being disrespected and dehumanised in other ways. A deeper recognition of these maintaining mechanisms is required to reveal the entirety of the system that benefits so few of us.
This is a call to action. Whatever our speciality, discipline or location, we need to call out these processes and identify the commonalities of their form and functions from our respective corners. We can tackle the stealthy ways that even the most well-intentioned of services and professionals can reinforce harmful intersections of oppression and stigmatisation. Cross-disciplinary spaces are crucial opportunities for researchers, practitioners, survivors and activists to establish a shared language and unite our voices in calling out the foundational processes of a system designed to protect itself against criticism, deconstruction and meaningful change.
Amy Beddows is a CBT therapist and PhD student at London Metropolitan University researching women’s experiences of victim blame. She has a special interest in the ways that media can reflect, subvert and challenge misogyny and violence against women.
‘Forget TV, it will never show you the experience of the victim’: representations of rape in Mindhunter by Amy Beddows from the Journal of Gender-Based Violence is available on Bristol University Press Digital.
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