Psychologists have postulated that blaming victims, such as saying 'you were in the wrong place at the wrong time', is a defense mechanism that helps blamers feel the world is still just even when there is evidence it's not.

A team of social science scholars believe they have found a direct way to spare victims the unwarranted social insult to their personal injuries: Emotional disclosure by witnesses. They found that that witnesses blame victims much less if they express, in writing, the disturbing thoughts and feelings that victims' ordeals arouse in them.

Witnesses who suppress these feelings, and who keep their distress 'locked inside', do blame victims, say the research team of University-Newark psychology professor Kent Harber, Peter Podolski of the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Christian H. Williams of RU-N's psychology department 

"Victim-blaming is pervasive," says Harber. "It is experienced by sufferers of deadly illnesses, crippling accidents, natural disasters, physical assault, economic hardship; indeed, nearly all bad events. For victims, this blaming is profoundly hurtful and it can wound as deeply as the injury itself."

Previous psychology papers have attempted to explain why observers blame victims, notes Harber. "It helps blamers retain faith in a just, fair, and controllable world where bad things mainly happen to bad (or inept, or unwise) people." 

Seeking a way to reduce victim blaming, Harber, Podolski and Williams conducted laboratory experiments using college students who viewed one of two movie clips. Some watched scenes from the 1988 film The Accused, which showed the violent sexual assault of a woman in a bar. Others watched a clip of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in heated economic debates with adversarial male political leaders. Thatcher, though embattled, was not a victim.

After the viewings, audience members were asked to write about the film they had seen. "Suppressors" could only provide factual, objective observations; they were not allowed to disclose their feelings. "Disclosers" were permitted to freely express their emotional reactions. Disclosing and suppressing had no effect on attitudes toward Thatcher, the non-victim. Results were markedly different for those watching the rape scene from The Accused. Suppressors, who could not reveal their emotions about the rape victim, were more likely to blame her. Disclosers, in contrast, blamed the victim much less. And the more words the disclosers wrote, and the more distress they conveyed, the less they blamed the victim.

"This first study confirmed that disclosure reduces victim blaming, but it left a somewhat troubling possibility unanswered," notes Harber. "What if disclosure, by alleviating the emotions that trigger blaming, tempers blaming of assailants as well as assault victims? If so, disclosure would absolve victimizers as well as victims."

The research team then conducted a second study which showed that this was not the case. This research methodology was nearly identical to the first study but with one exception: viewers also evaluated the adversarial men in the movies they viewed: Thatcher's opponents, for subjects who viewed the Thatcher documentary, and the rape victim's attackers, for those who viewed The Accused. Results showed that disclosure only reduced blaming for the rape victim; it had no effect on attitudes towards her assailants, who were condemned equally by disclosers and suppressors. As in the first study, suppression led to blaming of the rape victim. In fact, the victim was faulted nearly as much as were her attackers. Disclosing and suppressing had no effect on Thatcher's adversaries, as expected.

According to Harber, the combined studies "suggest that people can best help victims by first addressing their own emotional needs."

Citation: "Emotional Disclosure and Victim-Blaming", Emotion, May 2015.