In light of some events on and off of campus, I think we need to talk about a little something called “victim-blaming”. Victim-blaming is when the victim or survivor of a crime is held responsible for what happened to them. For example, victims/survivors of rape and sexual assault are often asked what they were wearing, or if they had been drinking. These questions imply that it is the victim’s fault that they were assaulted because of how they were dressed or if they were intoxicated.

Even after the shooting in Ferguson in August, people were saying that an unarmed teenager deserved to be murdered by an officer of the law because he stole cigarettes (even though there is video evidence of him paying for them), or because he injured the officer (even though the Ferguson PD was caught releasing false x-rays depicting the officer’s supposed injuries). Anyway, I digress. As we all (should) know is that the victim is never the one to blame, it is always the aggressor. Nobody brings death or assault or rape upon themselves – these are actions that the aggressor has chosen to perform and the victim is never responsible. The idea that victims are responsible for the violent crimes against them is not only irresponsible and offensive, but it also lets the aggressor shed responsibility for their harmful and illegal actions.

Victim-blaming is everywhere in our society, and most people don’t even notice it. After the infamous Steubenville rape in 2012 in which a 16-year-old girl was raped by two high-school boys while she was unconscious, the media mourned the ending of promising futures in football for the rapists and had no sympathy for the girl they had chosen to rape. Tennis star Serena Williams said in an interview with Rolling Stone that the rape victim “shouldn’t have put herself in that position.”

Like, what? In what fucked up world is it a teenage girl’s fault when multiple young men strip her and rape her while she’s unconscious? And if you’re going to suggest that she shouldn’t have been drinking (ohh, look how original you are! Nobody has ever said that to a rape victim before!), I would suggest that you instead try something different, like never talking ever again, or punching yourself really hard in the stomach, or perhaps dunking your head in a toilet.

Even more recently, (actual cannibal) Shia LeBeouf spoke out and said that he had been raped by a woman during his #IAMSORRY art exhibit. Almost immediately, everyone in the world seemed to think that their opinion was the most important and twitter, Facebook, and no doubt other social platforms were flooded with people who were all determined to assure everyone that a man can’t possibly be raped by a woman. This is, as we all know, very wrong. Piers Morgan, some British douche, said in an article for dailymail.co.uk, “I was enraged by his claim to have been ‘raped’ because, frankly – he wasn’t.” This miserable little weasel-man went on to say that LaBeouf should have stopped the woman, that he put himself in this position by “allowing” her to continue, essentially that he was responsible for what she did to him (does this sound familiar?). Seriously, what a fucking asshole.

So yeah, if your first reaction (or second, or third, or hundredth) to hearing about somebody being raped or beaten or even murdered is to think about what the victim could have done differently I have some advice for you: shhhh. Shut up. Rethink your entire life. Please and thank you. Victims and their families already have much of the mainstream media saying that they deserve what happened to them because they were a slut, or because they drank too much, or because they didn’t fight back, or because they were a thug.

Repeat after me kids: NOBODY, REGARDLESS OF HOW MUCH THEY’VE HAD TO DRINK, WHAT THEY WERE WEARING, OR THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN, DESERVES TO BE RAPED, BEATEN, MURDERED OR OTHERWISE BRUTALIZED (catchy, right? I should put it on a bumper sticker).

Oh, and before anyone comes screaming over to me about sourcing that Ferguson information, I would suggest that you look outside the mainstream media for your education, because they seem intent on repeating the same lies released by Ferguson PD over and over again (or just send me a nice little message on Facebook and I can send you a link to a fully-sourced master post that sums up everything the media didn’t tell us) (emphasis on nice in that last set of parentheses because if you’re too much of a dick I’ll either ignore you or make fun of you for being such a dick), or just, I don’t know, use this incredible thing called “the internet” to do your research.