[afro-nets] More on blaming the victim

[Claudio Schuftan <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

More on blaming the victim
--------------------------
 From George Kent <kent@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 rip-
ping off. Ryan was one of the few to see what we now call struc-
tural 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: in-
dividuals 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 in-
stitutions 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 indi-
viduals and countries everywhere are surrounded by abundant op-
portunities.

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 pun-
ish 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 as-
sess chronic conditions, such as discrimination, poverty or hun-
ger, as human rights issues. The violations approach, and thus
the issue of justiciability, is oriented more to addressing di-
rect violence than structural violence. Violations, in general,
are understood in terms of specific acts, not chronic condi-
tions. The difficulty with focusing on individuals, whether as
victims or as perpetrators, is that it is harder to see the so-
cial 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 accountabil-
ity. 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 ap-
proach 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 help-
ing 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 Organi-
zation and the World Trade Organization on WTO Agreements & Pub-
lic 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 coun-
tries too are embedded in a global system that systematically
keeps most poor and powerless countries in their sorry condi-
tion.

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 politi-
cal and economic forces that keep them down. For example, mas-
sive 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, be-
come 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, perva-
sive system of structural violence in which we are all embedded?

George Kent
mailto:kent@hawaii.edu