Who will be a Victim?

Who is more likely to become a victim?

Well, there are many examples of people in particular categories who are more likely to become victims.. Let`s just look at those first: Children, of course, the mentally ill, old people, the sick, and of course anyone with diminished faculties, for whatever reason. Why? The answer is that it is easier to abuse, in any way, someone who is weaker in some way, who has less awareness, principally because they may not understand, may not be able to represent themselves adequately, or may not be believed when they tell someone else.

Let`s take sexual abuse of a child: Someone with greater power can use threats and manipulation to prevent a child from disclosing the truth and also a child is less believable than adults in anycase. Children are also suggestible, they will likely take on guilt that is ascribed to them and not be able to reason through the justifications fed to them.
Someone mentally ill may realise they are being abused, in whatever form that may take, yet if they tell someone what is happening, they are less likely to be believed because they are deemed to be lacking capacity.
A person who is ill, perhaps elderly, may not have awareness to know what is happening and may not have the wherewithal or stamina to tell someone in a position of authority.
For all of these vulnerable people, the main reason for the perpetrator bullying or abusing them in particular, is that their lack of social power tends to make them invalid as witnesses to their own situation. In short....and this is not just a little like Darwin`s survival of the fittest, the stronger amongst us human animals can victimise the weaker and those that feed off victims tend to abuse where they wont get caught.

So what of children who get bullied in school, or women who fall victim to men, or the employee who gets bullied at work? Are they identifiable as being weak? Well, they don`t necessarily have a weakness that renders them vulnerable, but folks who become prey to ongoing bullying often have a vulnerability. Take a child who is a little shy, perhaps under-confident, perhaps unhappy, as soon as they walk into a school their body-language gives off a signal to children who have learned to want to hurt other children that this child can be their victim.

As we examined before, a bully may have been bullied, or he/she may have learned how to bully by watching it done to others. Some children copy the bullying mode of relationship and inflict it upon other children. Some children who are bullied discharge their own pain by hurting other kids. But some children bullied or undermined or unloved at home become burdened with low self-esteem, and, without an adequate core-self, they become easy targets for victim seekers in school and beyond. And victim seekers have a major talent for sniffing-out vulnerability.

We can apply this to adults also: If an adult has low confidence, maybe has some life problems, feels inadequate, they can become targets for abuse. Some people just find it difficult to stand up for themselves and end up being made fun of by the people around them. Referring back to medical misogyny: A strong woman with lots of confidence would be less likely to become victim to a doctor, as indeed anyone with strong family support will be safer in these terms. Confidence and being part of a group is always a protecting factor. The bully will always sense that someone is under-confident or that they wont have support from the people around them. It`s all part of the animal instinct that is able to assess, almost instantly, any person encountered.

This is a sad state of affairs indeed...Some people just like to have a victim, it is second nature to them, and although, of course, there are many good people who wouldn`t take part in such insidious behaviour, we should not forget that our social world functions around the survival of the fittest.

Covert Misogyny 2.

Right, now back to this huge subject.... Let`s see if we can shed some more light on it:

We have looked at some reasons why some doctors practice covert misogyny and now I want to think about why such a profession permits this to happen. You might say "permits it by default", since the profession as a whole would be loath to admit that it occurs at all. I think that this denial has parallels with any individual or group that pretends that abuse isn`t really happening. For example, where there was abuse of children in the Catholic Church, denial was the biggest factor in the whole saga.

When we talk about an individual denying their guilt we see that they do so to protect themselves from punishment. Somehow "denial", they hope, protects their innocence. But why do members of a group protect each other? After all, why protect someone who might be guilty? The person protecting someone else isn`t guilty, so why trouble to shelter someone who is? How do they square this with their conscience?

Well, part of this may be to do with feeling that they cannot be sure that the person is guilty, maybe they want to believe that they are not guilty, and part of it this has to do with the connection and loyalty they feel for their colleagues.
Let`s look at this in regard to a priest: The priest may be a nice man, long serving in the church, he has many close friends...he may have done kindnesses for other clergy... This creates a loyalty and a feeling in others that they do not want to believe that he is guilty. In anycase, if they report him for suspected abuse, they may be impugning him by mistake and turn his life into a nightmare, not forgetting that to report him to the police will bring trouble for themselves: they may not be believed, their colleagues may turn against them, etc. In short, keeping shtum is the preferable option. The most important dynamic here though, is reciprocal loyalty within the group: If you protect a colleague, they will certainly protect you! Because of this,cases are rare where someone is brave enough to betray a colleague in the name of right.

This is broadly what happens in groups, it is all about group cohesion and group function and group survival. This very same mechanism will be in play in the medical profession when a doctor medically abuses a patient. Doctors simply don`t want to believe that some of their colleagues are misogynists and if they half see it, they turn a blind eye.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, where someone is guilty in regard to someone else, the compartmental conscience kicks in and there is activated a demonisation of the wounded party.(In cases of sexual abuse, this would involve making the child look guilty). The function of demonisation is to shift guilt from the abuser/ perpetrator onto the victim. This facilitates a concealment of guilt. When we observe this in regard to one-to -one relationships, the power of the guilt-shift is played out depending upon the power of the individuals concerned. That is, which one is weak, which one is strong; which one has endurance and which one doesn`t; which one is more forgiving,etc. The game-play ratchets up when one uses their own social or family group as an endorsement of their demonisation strategy. The person in this one-to-one battle, who has greater social skills, greater prowess at manipulating, will doubtless win the war when they recruit a group around them to support their position. It`s simple:a group has more power.

The same is true of doctors who medically abuse women: The surest way to hide what has happened is to demonise the woman, find concrete ways of showing that she is "mad" or "bad" and that therefore the doctor hasn`t done anything wrong at all!!! The simplest way to do this is with psychiatric diagnosis. When there is a psychiatric diagnosis attached to a female patient it becomes almost impossible for the medical abuse to be revealed. Of course, this is gross misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, but who would ever find out?

You might wonder how doctors manage their consciences, both to themselves and in regard to their colleagues.. Well, it`s our old friend the compartmental conscience !!! When a woman is medically abused and she is then demonised in order to hide what has occurred, the demonisation is the salve to the conscience. The doctor thinks, "well, this woman is an attention-seeker, or at least neurotic, and my colleague certainly has, therefore, done nothing wrong. It`s the woman`s fault." This way he shuts out the truth and carries on ethically with his other patients, with this woman-victim safely shut away in a bad box in his mind.

Overt abuse of women.

We see abuse of women in all sorts of ways in society, often violent or sexual in nature. We also see repression and disrespect of women associated with some religions and cultures. Women are sometimes trapped by domestic violence, both physically and psychologically. These cases are in the public consciousness so as examples of typical, overt abuse, let`s try to think about why this happens..

I think that it`s worth having a look at some of the factors that enable domestic violence. Of course not all causes apply and there will be a variety of factors involved, but the obvious one to look at first is the difference in physical size and strength between a man and a woman. Some men actually look for someone they can bully because of their own acquired behaviour: The bullied will often bully simply because that is how they have learned to behave from those around them.It is not always the case, though, that a man who bullies has been bullied in his earlier life, it can be that he has witnessed bullying, maybe his father bullied his mother, or even vice versa, and that this can become the mode of relationship that he knows best. It is also often the case that women can be drawn to men who are bullies, either having been bullied themselves, or they too having witnessed bullying at close hand. Many women, unwittingly, assume the role of the bullied one in a relationship.

Why should this happen? Well, just as children learn love or cooperation or compromise from the people around them in their early years, so, if they are exposed to hatred or disrespect or bullying, they can learn these instead. These traits can become the only expression of "love" that they know and children can confuse them as such. A man who assimilates the role of bully can still feel this role as an expression of "love", just as a woman who mistakes the pain and violence of abuse as part of the environment for a "loving" relationship, can experience a lovelessness without the presence of abuse. It is simply a matter of what we learn and what we experience in our adult lives. Some people, though, have exposure to bullying in their early life and adopt the passive persons role, rejecting the bullies position. Women too often have low self esteem, learned sometimes from their mother, a role-model victim, and reinforced through life.


Now of course, women are not "asking for it" when this scenario occurs, they just often get into abusive relationships because they mistake what is on offer for love. They are not conscious of what they are doing, neither, often, are the men who bully them. It is all hidden in their pasts and enacted without so very much control.

I really wonder whether women would ever get into an abusive relationship if it weren`t for one or other of the above reasons. Having witnessed, though, a friend being verbally disrespected and systematically undermined over a long period of time, maybe with no background of inflicted abuse and no witness of it, I still noted that this woman had low self esteem, and this coupled with a desire to exculpate her husband at every turn, prevented her from taking action to reclaim herself and her self-respect. The trouble is, where there is weakness anywhere in society there are people who want to take advantage.

Why should it serve men to undermine women? Well, a woman who is weakened will comply with sex or do what they are told to do. The psychology is simple, weaken her and you can dominate her. In this sense we can see that the inadequacies of the man will diminish in his own eyes if he can dominate his woman...but also, I think, that abusing someone kicks into gear the compartmental conscience (please see my previous blog about this devise) as the man struggles to off-load his guilt at treating a woman so badly. The compartmental conscience here will get him off the hook because it will see blameworthy characteristics in the woman that CAUSE him to HAVE to be abusive. The more he abuses her, the more the compartmentalising has to work ever harder to escape guilt and the more violent the man becomes. Because of this, the situation is almost beyond repair for the bully because the compartment in his mind that says the bullying is justifiable, because the woman is guilty/bad/unloving or whatever, is dependant upon the violence and abuse to justify itself. The compartmental tool isn`t without needs itself and wants a return for helping the man do his dirty work.(This happens in any such similar situation, of course.)The more the guilt incurred, the higher the stakes.)

I will need to think aloud about this some more in the near future as well as talking about covert abuse of women, so please tune into me next time.