Victimology Paper
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1536504214533498.pdf
38 contexts.org
by rebecca tiger
suffering in an age of personal responsibility by susan sered
39S P R I N G 2 0 1 4 c o n t e x t s
I was sitting on a stoop with Gloria, an African American woman in
her early 50s, when a man came by who had been stalking her, and
making threatening and suggestive gestures. I had heard him call
out the window to her with an aggressive demand for sex. This was
not a one-time event: Gloria has been violently assaulted, raped,
homeless, broke, and incarcerated throughout much of her adult life.
Her comments to me that afternoon were surprising.
“People helped me realize [that] I went up into my head
too much.” The issues were “all up in my head,” and “I have
stopped going there.”
Why, I wondered, was Gloria saying that her “issues” had
to do with her own mental state rather than with the actions
of the stalker—and the many other men who have abused her?
Gloria is like many women who have been victimized by
sexual and physical assaults, and seen the blame turned back
on them either for making “bad choices” to put themselves in
“dangerous situations” or for failing to “get over the trauma”
in a timely fashion.
I first encountered Gloria in 2008 when she agreed to
participate in a five-year project designed to understand the
life experiences of women in Massachusetts who have been
incarcerated. At first we interacted primarily at a halfway house
for women on parole and at a drop-in center where homeless
women could put down their bags and relax in easy chairs. Our
relationship grew gradually as I visited Gloria and several dozen
other women in prisons, hospitals and shelters; joined them for
coffee and participated in family events; and frequently picked
them up curbside when they were kicked out by a boyfriend,
evicted from housing, released from jails or hospitals or simply
could not bear another night on the street.
vicious cycles Like Gloria, more than three-quarters of incarcerated
women have been targets of sexual abuse. Nearly all are poor
and living with chronic pain and illness. A vicious cycle shapes
their lives: they may initially run away from abusive homes,
partners, and husbands only to find that they are struggling
to survive on streets without support for themselves and their
children. Shoplifting or other petty crimes often become the
only way to scrape by, and illicit drug use may be increasingly
attractive in order to “self medicate” (Gloria’s words) in the
wake of fear, pain, and violence. Addiction exacerbates the
Contexts, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 38-43. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2014 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504214533498
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struggle to maintain health and stability, arrest and incarcera-
tion add more layers of misery, and on it goes. Among women
in my project, nearly two-thirds left home by the age of sev-
enteen, only 30 percent graduated high school, less than half
have ever held a full-time job, nearly all lack stable housing,
all live with chronic physical and mental illnesses, and all but
one were arrested for drug-related offenses.
Gloria has spent a great deal of her adult life traveling
through various institutions that serve the poor and afflicted,
from jails and prisons, to hospitals and rehabilitation programs,
social worker and welfare offices, and homeless shelters.
While the mandates of each institution vary — punishment,
protection, helping, curing—each promotes, albeit in differ-
ent words, the notion that individuals can choose their health,
employment and social status, and that we are responsible for
our own misfortune. In line with the American narrative of
individualism, the penal-welfare-healthcare circuit drills women
like Gloria in an ideological script that attributes suffering to
private trauma, personal flaws, female gender attributes, and
their own poor choices.
Despite abundant good will on the part of nearly all
caseworkers, nurses, doctors, therapists—and even many cor-
rectional officers—this institutional circuit repeatedly has failed
to help Gloria gain health, security, or financial self-sufficiency.
Ignoring the real social, racial, gender and economic inequali-
ties and violence that thrust her and kept her stuck in miserable
circumstances, the institutional
script attributes her suffering to
her own flaws to explain why
she suffers.
Highly gender specific, this
script typically casts women as
“co-dependent,” “stuck in a
victim mentality,” or “lacking
self-esteem.” Echoing ideas that
resonate throughout American
culture, this script holds enor-
mous power for women like
Gloria. Adhering to it may bring
rewards, including custody of
children, appropriate medical
care, and reinstatement of wel-
fare eligibility. Individuals who
choose not to play their assigned
role, by failing to “own up” to
their own role and blaming others or the “system” for their situ-
ation, may find that they do not “earn” early release from prison,
favorable evaluations from caseworkers, or other benefits.
Despite the harshness of their lives, the homeless, impoverished,
abused, and criminalized women whom I have come to know do
not describe the world as a place of relentless suffering. Rather,
they depict themselves as anomalous in that they suffer so much
in a world in which other people are able
to have “normal” (their word) families,
jobs, houses, and health. Most believe (or
at least hope) that someday they will have
the kinds of homes and families they see
on television.
gloria’s “choices” The daughter of blue- and pink-collar workers, Gloria grew
up in a working-class African-American family in one of Boston’s
racially segregated neighborhoods. Shortly after graduating high
school Gloria gave birth to her first child. Unable to rely on the
baby’s father, Gloria continued living with her mother who helped
her take care of the baby. Shifts “dancing” (stripping) at a local
bar were not her first choice of employment, but they helped
pay the bills. At about that time Gloria met a man who gave her
one hit of a crack pipe. A year later Gloria fell in love with a man
who tried to pimp her. Shortly afterwards, her mother died and
she became homeless. And, when it looked like bad couldn’t get
worse, Gloria suffered an assault that changed her life. Attacked
in a drug deal gone bad, she suffered a traumatic head injury
causing chronic memory loss. After two years in the hospital and
a rehabilitation facility receiving treatment for a brain injury and
PTSD, she was released to the streets, homeless, with an expec-
tation that she would get by on her disability payment (Social
Security Income) of less than $700 each month. For the next 10
The suffering of individuals is attributed to private trauma, personal flaws, and their own poor choices.
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years Gloria moved in and out
of homeless shelters, the apart-
ments of male acquaintances
(in return for sex), crack houses
and occasionally spent nights at
her son’s grandmother’s apart-
ment. She relies on an impressive
array of pharmaceuticals to get
by—anti-anxiety, anti-depressant,
and sundry pain medications. She
has become one of millions of
Americans who, according to
recent studies over the past four
decades, take psychiatric medi-
cation to cope with day-to-day
pressures.
beating herself up Gloria’s greatest concern
has been housing. Without a
stable place to live she is dependent on men, vulnerable to
assaults on the streets, and visible to police who stop her for
loitering, soliciting or simply “walking while black.”
Shortly after I first met her, she was placed into an SRO
(single resident occupancy) building by an agency that helps the
homeless. She enjoyed coming and going as she pleased. She
liked the local caseworker who visited. But, without her own
bathroom or access to a kitchen or extra bedroom for guests
and her children, the downsides of her rooming house are clear.
To make matters worse, because she is officially housed, she has
been removed from the priority list for subsidized apartments.
“They are giving them first to homeless people and I [already]
have a place,” Gloria says wistfully.
Gloria witnesses the byzantine nature of bureaucracies,
but her explanations for her plight focus on herself as the
source of her problems. She blames
herself for not finding an agency that
could place her in an apartment instead
of an SRO (although the waiting list
for an apartment is years as opposed
to months for an SRO). She legitimates
her self-blame, pointing out that, “even
my caseworker says I need to work on
myself first, before I can work on better
housing.” If housing is Gloria’s biggest
worry, men are a close second. For two
years, she has been stalked at the SRO by a man who lives
directly above her, and she is harassed by a different male
neighbor. Though she reports these problems, the SRO build-
ing manager takes little action. All the while, Gloria reiterates
the language of therapeutic culture by framing her suffering
as the result of her own “paranoia” or inability to “be alone
and stand up for myself.”
Making matters worse, her boyfriend John was released
from prison and insisted on staying with her. Gloria could be
evicted for hosting an overnight guest and she pleaded for John
to leave, but he ignored or mocked her cries. (In his defense, he
was released from prison with no money, no job, no chance of
finding a job with his criminal record, and, due to his record, no
eligibility for public housing.)
Within days of moving in with her, John resumed his drug
use and began helping himself to Gloria’s money and posses-
sions. Soon, he began to wage a campaign of physical abuse.
She didn’t call the police because, like many women, she was
afraid to make her abuser even angrier.
Like so many other women, she struggles to come to
terms with his behavior. “He is the best man I’ve ever been
with,” she says. “He makes me feel loved. He hugs me on the
street.” And, when we speak, she blames herself, saying, “my
problem is that I need a man, I don’t want to be on my own”
and then her own “paranoia” as the cause of her fear of John.
Gloria’s focus on her own deficiencies is part of a widespread
tendency in America to blame victims for their lot in life. In her
book The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to
the War on Terror, scholar Alyson Cole argues that in American
Institutions too often fail to help Gloria and others gain health, security or financial self-sufficiency. Instead, they give them simple— and simplistic — language to explain why they suffer.
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culture blaming others for one’s misfortunes is often seen as “an
expression of weakness, moral or psychological, and a dangerous
abdication of personal responsibility,” and that victimhood has
come to be associated with weakness, dependence, effeminacy,
being manipulative, and even criminality. Sentiments of this sort
were infamously proclaimed in 2012 presidential candidate Mitt
Romney’s comment that there are “47 percent of Americans
who will automatically vote for Obama… [These are people]
who are dependent upon government, who believe that they
are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to
care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care,
to food, to housing, to you-name-it… These are people who
pay no income tax.”
Although Romney did not win the election, his remarks
resonate with the personal responsibility script that Gloria and
other women learn throughout the social service and correc-
tional circuit. Not only has this script failed to help Gloria stay
out of danger or out of jail, it has compounded her misery by
telling her that her problems are her own fault.
admitting powerlessness A year or so after John moved in with her, Gloria’s drug use
escalated and her family responded. Her adult sons and sisters
kept her with family, and
then eventually registered
her at a drug rehab program
for women. While there is
a spectrum of rehabilita-
tion facilities, ranging from
the elite Betty Ford clinic to
programs associated with
prisons or homeless shel-
ters, the core ideologies
tend to be similar. Under-
standing drug use as a
symptom of an individual
being out of control, these
programs tend to be highly
structured and routinized.
At Gloria’s facility, residents
cannot leave to see their
children and they have lim-
ited phone privileges.
The program is modeled on the Twelve Step principles made
famous by Alcoholics Anonymous. Staff members encourage
women to “work on themselves” in terms of dealing with
resentment, disappointment, frustration, anger and sadness,
and supports “spiritual growth.”
Group leaders—some of whom are psychotherapists and
some of whom are simply AA/NA (Alcoholics Anonymous/
Narcotics Anonymous) “veterans”—preach that the individ-
ual is responsible for his or her failings, that blaming others
for one’s suffering is actually a symptom of the disease of
addiction (“denial”), and that it is either
hubris or pathology to try to change
the world. Women are urged to admit
“powerlessness” over the incurable dis-
ease of addiction, turn their lives over to
a Higher Power, and carry out an audit of
their “defects of character.” Over the past
decades Gloria has participated in count-
less Twelve Step groups. Judges mandate
AA/NA attendance for individuals accused or convicted of drunk
driving or illegal drug use; drug courts routinely include AA/
NA meetings as part of the program; and AA/NA attendance is
often required by a judge as a condition for contact with chil-
dren or for parole. While AA/NA participation is not obligatory
in Massachusetts prisons, obtaining a certificate attesting one’s
attendance at meetings can prove to caseworkers that one is
“doing the right thing” and earn early release from jail or satisfy
the demands of a parole or probation officer. As a consequence
of repeated contact with AA/NA, Gloria is a pro at reciting AA/
NA slogans such as “Let Go and Let God.”
Gloria’s program also provided individual and group
therapy sessions on topics such as “how to lose the victim
By assigning individual rather than collective responsibility for human suffering, we absolve governments and corporate leaders from responsibility.
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mentality.”Requirements to attend therapy are common for
women on probation or parole and for women who are involved
with child welfare services as a condition to see or keep their chil-
dren. Many have been treated in in-patient hospital settings and
have seen therapists while in prison. And virtually all of the women
spend large amounts of time, especially while in prison and in
programs, watching television shows such as Jerry Springer and
Oprah that implicitly and explicitly rehearse psycho-therapeutically
informed scripts that mock women for masochistically choosing
to stay with cheating men (Jerry) or encourage women to develop
the self-esteem to leave abusive men (Oprah).
Repeatedly, in virtually all settings within the rehabilitation
program, Gloria was coached in the iconic American script for
individuals down on their luck: they should “work harder,” “pull
themselves together” and “get over it.”
self-blaming A few days after leaving rehab, Gloria stopped by my office
to share her excitement about the progress she had made in the
program. I asked why this most recent program was so helpful
while the many other similar programs she had done in the past
had not led to changes in her life circumstances. After a bit of
thought she explained that, “this time I was ready to hear it,”
and she shared this example: “In one group [therapy session]
they asked about bad things that happened in our childhoods. I
said I couldn’t think of anything. The counselor told me that I am
blocking something. But I didn’t remember any bad things. Then
I heard a voice in the room say ‘abandonment’ and I thought
‘yes, that is it!’ God was showing me [through this voice] that
is thing I am blocking—abandonment.”
Gloria had never before mentioned that she had been
abandoned as a child; quite the contrary, she often described
growing up as the beloved baby sister in a large close-knit family.
On more than one occasion she had told me that her mother
and father “were the best parents ever—they stuck it out ‘til
death do us part.’” Later on, after we went our separate ways,
I mused on cruelty in the encouragement Gloria was given to
“discover” that the true cause of her current misery lay in her
own experiences and family—when, in fact, her family has been
the sole source of physical and emotional support for her over
decades in which she has struggled with poverty, homelessness,
racism and violence. In this way, the script of personal respon-
sibility for suffering pours salt on the wounds of sufferers. At
the same time, by assigning individual rather than collective
responsibility for human suffering, we divert attention from
the misery caused by economic, racial and gender inequalities
and absolve governments and corporate leadership from public
responsibilities for the wellbeing of citizens.
When I first met Gloria, the United States had the highest
incarceration rate in the world, and those rates were steadily
going up. Six years later, incarceration rates are declining (more
so for men than for women) and the White House has outlined
a new drug policy that shifts the focus from punishment to
treatment for drug abuse. While treatment aimed at helping the
individual is certainly more benign than prison, both place the
onus of responsibility on the personal flaws of individuals rather
than on the broader social inequalities, including sexual violence,
that shape the life worlds of women like Gloria. As I have learned
in Massachusetts, even with the best of intentions—and virtually
all of the rehab staff, therapists, doctors, nurses, social work-
ers, caseworkers and even correctional officers I have met are
indeed well-intentioned—individualized treatment cannot cure
structural inequalities.
recommended resources Chesney-Lind, Meda. The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime (now in its third edition; Sage, 2012). A well-researched, non-voyeuristic book covering a variety of aspects of women and criminalization.
Cole, Alyson M. The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2007). Deconstructs the gendered and political meanings of “victim- hood” in American culture.
Haney, Lynne. Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire (University of California Press, 2010). Describes community-based prison alternative programs for women. In these programs, the emphasis is on women’s personal pathologies.
McCorkel, Jill. Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Poli- tics of Imprisonment (NYU Press, 2013). Analyzes the shift from rehabilitation to “habilitation” in women’s prisons.
Richie, Beth E. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (NYU Press, 2012). Provides a thoughtful analysis of how cultural attitudes and social policies damage the health, freedom and well-being of black women.
Whitaker, Robert. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychi- atric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Broadway Paperbacks, 2010). A highly accessible introduction to questions regarding the use of psychiatric medication.
Susan Sered is in the sociology department at Suffolk University. She is the author
of Can’t Catch a Break: Gender, Jail, Drugs, and the Limits of Personal Responsibility.
The images accompanying this article are from photographer Jane Evelyn Atwood’s decade-long study of women in prisons around the world. They appear in the 2000 book, Too Much Time: Women in Prison, which is considered the definitive photographic work on women in prison.
