This is coming perilously close to victim blaming.
When these horrible tweets are made, there's always a contingent who says that the target should ignore them. You probably should if they are completely anonymous. But if they aren't - have at 'em!
When these horrible tweets are made, there's always a contingent who says that the target should ignore them. You probably should if they are completely anonymous. But if they aren't - have at 'em!
I think of taking precautions online as being like defensive driving (or any kind of risk management really). If Alice gets sideswiped on the highway because Bob was on his cell phone and didn't check his blind spot, Bob maybe gets charged with failure to maintain the lane or something like that. Doesn't Alice share some responsibility by recognizing that Bob, being on his cell phone, posed an elevated risk and managing accordingly (say by changing to a more distant lane)?
Secondly, you should be able to congratulate your daughter on Twitter regardless of your status as a public person.
I can't be held responsible for your actions. Making an innocent tweet about your daughter is not something you should have to be worried about. That's chilling freedom of expression! So you can't be a proud dad because some arsehole might threaten to rape your daughter? Give me a break.
I agree that Alice in my example doesn't have any legal fault for the accident. Maybe this is a cultural difference, but as I see it she does share some responsibility for being in the accident if she didn't make a best-effort attempt using known-good practices to avoid it. All drivers share that responsibility.
I'm assuming you see it happening as you drive past. But do you look into each car intently to see what the driver is doing? I see drivers on phones, but I'm sure I don't see all of them. I'm normally aching the traffic and the way they are braking/swerving to determine if the driver is someone to keep clear of.
There is no cultural difference on this one that I'm aware of. In Australia you must be aware of what is going on around you on the road. But you asked about victim blaming - I think someone above expressed it better than me, and you thanked them for their post. That's the one I'm going with :-)
Er, yeah, it is. The victim always knows they exercised "poor risk management", to some degree. You don't need to reinforce that point. It's not what the takeaway lesson should ever be. It detracts attention (and implicitly averts blame) from the perpetrator.
We don't aspire to live in a world where "risk management" becomes the takeaway lesson from events perpetrated by conscious actors (i.e. you should always exercise risk management when it comes to things like hurricanes).
Because then you start saying things like:
"She shouldn't have been walking alone at night."
"She shouldn't have been wearing that dress."
"If he didn't want to get raped he shouldn't have gone to prison."
This is a delicate issue. The answer to your question has to be: No, not per se...
However there are some other things to keep in mind:
() If one suggests that the victim's poor risk management absolves the perpetrator of responsibility in the slightest degree, then one is definitely blaming the victim.
() Sometimes that subtext -- that the perpetrator is not fully responsible -- is present but not stated explicitly. So I think people are often right to be aware of the possibility that that's underneath what is being said.
() On the other hand, sometimes that subtext is absolutely not intended, but is heard anyway. A lot of people have trouble with the notion that two parties to an interaction are both 100% responsible for their own choices. And someone recently victimized may not be emotionally ready to look at how they allowed it to happen. So one must be careful here; but sometimes, if one wants to get the point across, it's necessary to emphasize that the perpetrator is still totally responsible for their own actions.
So in your example, if you were to suggest that Bob's fine should be reduced because Alice could have prevented the accident, that would be victim blaming. But if you're only saying that Alice could learn from this (to be more alert, to try to stay out of other people's blind spots, and to watch out for nearby drivers using cell phones) then that isn't victim blaming.