Victim blaming is a slippery slope argument, because you can, by that stupid logic, ALWAYS find fault with the victim of a crime. You can always find a point where they 'did something' that caused their victimization, or their rape, or their robbery, or their murder.
She shouldn't have worn that skirt
She shouldn't have gotten drunk
She shouldn't have taken a private photo, she should have known apple's cloud security inside and out
Those people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima should have moved, they knew cities would be targets.
Why even have a legal system? Shit's always the victim's fault for not being adequately prepared for being violated.
This is a bit of a stretch - and I say that as someone who passionately hates victim blaming, although mostly in the context of sexual assault and rape. The reason being that in cases of sexual assault and rape, victim blaming is used to silence and intimidate victims and allows those who assault them to keep doing it with minimal consequence. And it puts the onus on women to avoid being assaulted rather than on men to stop assaulting them.
So yeah. Victim blaming is terrible.
And going completely in that direction with this situation - hacked photos, etc - feels really ugly.
But this also feels different.
Blaming victims for doing things like not automatically assuming that a man will try to rape them is bad. But what do you do with a person who tells you, straight up, that he/she/it is going to hurt you? Yes, it's still his/her fault for hurting you, but at some point there should be some degree of responsibility for not walking into an obvious, vulnerable situation with a violent psychopath, right?
The internet is that violent psychopath. Or, more specifically, it is populated by them and puts anything and everything within their reach.
And victim blaming in the context of sexual assault is used to put the onus on women to avoid it rather than on men to stop doing it (broad generalization). And that's the opposite of what we need to be doing.
But in this case? We can't really put the onus on the sociopaths of the world to stop being sociopaths. Avoiding being a target is pretty much your only effective option. Yes, we absolutely should address the culture that treats women as objects and their bodies as property.
But we can't root out every single monster with a keyboard.
So this sucks. Because it feels like victim-blaming, and I fucking hate that. But it also doesn't really seem like there is a viable alternative. I can certainly still sympathize with the victims - they likely expected that those pictures would be secure and have been rudely informed that they were wrong.
But the only way to keep this from happening is to never take/post those pictures. Because the internet is a violent psychopath.
Fuck.