Who is to blame: the victim or the bully? - Veronica Saragi – 1788203042

In many cases of bullying, usually people blame the victim, but they should not. It seems that many people blame the victim even though they are called the victim of something bad. Hafer in 2000 believes that it’s because people usually believe that the world is a just place, that if someone is good they will have a good life, and someone will have a bad life if they are bad. This is why many people think that the fault lies in the victim because they are the one who has a bad life. This is wrong because of three reasons.

Bullies have proactive motives for aggression and anticipate happiness after victimizing others. Bullies are clearly the first ones who initiate this negative regular occurrence, so it does not make sense for the victims to be blamed. Van Dijk, Poorthuis, and Malti in 2017 found that bullies are children who behave aggressively to gain dominance, but they do it by attacking other children.

Meanwhile victims already blame themselves. Jaana Juvonen says many victims imagine that there must be something inherently wrong with themselves for this to be happening. With this victim-blaming culture, the victims feel as if they deserve to be bullied because there are people who blame them. Worst case scenario, they will be convinced that they don’t even deserve to live and commit suicide.

Finally, the people who are victims of bullying are almost always those who seem weak. According to the data found by Mary C. Lamia Ph.D., bullies don’t attack confident people but only attack people who appear to have a weakness. Bullies induce shame and humiliation in others by intuitively recognizing a person's insecurities and attacking them. This makes it clear that bullies are the ones who are wrong, because they purposefully attacked other people.

So, it is clear that it is bullies who are wrong, not the victims. We should not continue the victim-blaming culture, but we should do our best to support the victims.