Seminar 7: Centre for Gender and Violence Research Seminar Series

Amy Beddows' PhD research showed that victim blame is an inadequate concept for understanding societal responses towards women who have experienced violence (Beddows, 2022). As well as blamed, women felt judged, disrespected, and objectified by professionals across a range of agencies and sectors. They also felt that these responses were a reaction to who they were (their gender, age, sexuality, race and ethnicity, class, ability) more than their experiences of men’s violence.

Victimism - reducing women to the restrictive status of ‘victim’ (Barry, 1979) - and responsibilisation (Rose, 2000) - making women solely responsible for recovering from and preventing men’s violence - are more useful concepts for understanding the harmful ways that agencies respond to survivors. These processes are enacted through different aspects of practice: individual staff; policies and processes; physical environments; reputations and expectations.

These processes maintain the status quo by keeping focus and accountability on victims rather than perpetrators, professionals, or systems; therefore, they should be understood as a feature, rather than a bug, of patriarchal societies. Creating space for survivors – space for action, spaces to speak, and spaces to be and be with – can challenge negative messages and instead communicate respect, dignity, and value to women.

Speaker biography

Amy Beddows completed her PhD on women’s experiences of victim blame in 2022, at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU) at London Metropolitan University. She works as a trauma therapist in Edinburgh and is a consultant on violence against women. She is keen to continue her research into sexual violence and structural inequalities whilst exploring concrete ways to improve.

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