PHA-Exchange> More on blaming the victim

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

>From George Kent  kent at hawaii.edu

In the mid-1970s, William Ryan wrote a nice little book called 'Blaming the 
Victim' which showed how people on welfare were regularly characterized as 
being lazy or ignorant and their sorry conditions were their fault. It was 
assumed that anyone could pull oneself up by one's "own bootstraps" if he or 
she only tried hard enough. It was not recognized that for many the opportunity 
was just not there; their bootstraps just kept ripping off. Ryan was one of the 
few to see what we now call structural violence-the fact that some harms result 
from the nature of the social system itself.

Perhaps the appreciation of structural violence has not been just another 
passing fad; perhaps it has been pushed aside. For those who are well served by 
existing social systems, it is more comforting to see bad outcomes as resulting 
from bad agents: individuals remain poor because they are lazy or ignorant; 
AIDS is caused solely by sexual behaviour; market failures result from 
misbehaving corporations; and countries remain poor because they are not 
sufficiently engaged with the market. These can be fixed by structural 
adjustment, with the international financial institutions as global 
chiropractors.

"Give a man a fish and he eats for today, but teach a man to fish and he eats 
for a lifetime." We will teach the poor and powerless how to grow food, plan 
families, be entrepreneurs and democrats. We know how and they don't. Never 
mind that the fish may have been taken by others or destroyed by pollution, and 
that the fishing waters may have been fenced off. Never mind that the peasant 
already knows how to farm, but doesn't have a bit of land to call his own. The 
assumption always is that individuals and countries everywhere are surrounded 
by abundant opportunities.

Sometimes we focus on individuals as victims, and sometimes as perpetrators 
when, for example, human rights workers focus on specific violations. Bad 
things presumably happen because of bad governments. If the wrongdoers are 
rooted out, everything will be fine. In the violations orientation to human 
rights work, the central task is to identify violations and violators, collect 
evidence and "bring the violator to justice" through some sort of court 
procedure. War crimes tribunals are of this nature. The Convention on the 
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is emphatic, even in its 
title, about the need to punish violators.

Those who focus on violations tend to focus on specific events. Wrongs are seen 
to result from wrongdoing, from specific acts, while bad outcomes are seen as 
resulting from bad people, bad leaders or bad corporations.

>From this perspective, it is difficult to see or critically assess chronic 
conditions, such as discrimination, poverty or hunger, as human rights issues. 
The violations approach, and thus the issue of justiciability, is oriented more 
to addressing direct violence than structural violence. Violations, in general, 
are understood in terms of specific acts, not chronic conditions. The 
difficulty with focusing on individuals, whether as victims or as perpetrators, 
is that it is harder to see the social system in which both are embedded. It is 
important to see that the social structures can produce bad consequences such 
as widening economic gaps, even if there is no specific wrongdoing by any of 
the individual players.

Adjudication is not the only important mechanism of accountability. United 
Nations human rights treaty bodies have no power of adjudication. Instead, they 
use "constructive dialogue"-a softer approach intended to encourage errant 
States to take the right direction-which may be the most realistic and 
appropriate approach to dealing with the widespread resistance to anything that 
looks like global governance.

We need to see and acknowledge that the world does not work well for most of 
its people. Given modern capacities for producing food, there is no good reason 
for anyone anywhere to go hungry, but not less than 800 million people are 
malnourished. Every year, more than 10 million children die before their fifth 
birthday. Why do so many die? Many have the misfortune of being born in poor 
countries, but they are not born in a poor world. Perhaps it has something to 
do with the skew in the economic system. Poor people are paid less than rich 
people for the same work and for producing the same products. They also pay 
more for purchasing the same products, and for credit, for example. They tend 
to pay more for just about everything else.

The major international agencies should not only continue helping individuals 
and countries, but should also acknowledge that such local tinkering is not 
going to solve systemic problems. They need to see and acknowledge the 
functioning of the system. To illustrate, a recent joint study by the World 
Health Organization and the World Trade Organization on WTO Agreements & Public 
Health pointed out some specific health issues associated with trade, such as 
pathogens in goods. However, it did not grasp the "big picture" of the 
preponderant flow of food from poor to rich countries. The system is that the 
poor feed the rich. Surely, in a large-scale study on trade and health, that 
should be worth a look. Shouldn't someone be asking who benefits from the 
current trading system?

In many places, the most serious problem at the local level is the lack of 
opportunities to do meaningful, productive work. Too many people with high 
potential are pulling rickshaws or doing mind-numbing mechanical work on 
assembly lines. At the global level, the steadily widening gap between rich and 
poor is far more terrifying than terrorism. But, of course, those who are at 
the top end find it more useful to not see it; they simply call across the 
chasm for those on the other side to work even harder. 

International agencies recognize that many people are embedded in social 
systems that limit their possibilities, but they tend to emphasize the role of 
the individual (low income) rather than of the social context (high prices). We 
need to see that countries too are embedded in a global system that 
systematically keeps most poor and powerless countries in their sorry 
condition. 

The global marketplace is not an equal-opportunity marketplace. Many countries 
stay on the bottom no matter how much outsiders try to help them because, in 
many cases, of internal forces such as armed conflicts, rapid population growth 
and corrupt leaders. To some extent, it is also the results of international 
political and economic forces that keep them down. For example, massive 
subsidies of agricultural products in the United States, Japan and Europe 
result in their dumping large quantities of these products in poor countries, 
undermining their agricultural sectors. Poor countries cannot seem to get 
access to the markets of rich countries to sell their export products. It is 
not only individuals but also entire countries that have, in effect, become 
completely unemployed, totally marginalized by the global economic system. 
Those who are employed work on unfavourable terms, giving them no prospect of 
ever catching up.

Yes, poor countries should take responsibility and try to pull themselves up; 
however, with the playing field tilted so sharply against them, it becomes a 
Sisyphean struggle. They climb a bit and then some natural disaster, or more 
predictably inflation, overtakes and pushes them back. What's wrong with this 
picture? We will never know if we do not look at it. Before we argue about 
whether the system is deliberately tilted in favour of the powerful, we should 
plainly acknowledge that it is. When will the international agencies begin to 
look at the massive, pervasive system of structural violence in which we are 
all embedded? 

GK


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