Loving murderers and blaming monsters: how the victim gets caught in the crossfire

By Laura Bohnert

There are a lot of grey areas involved when it comes to defining the line between good and bad. It’s an occurrence that is best exemplified by Robin Hood: even criminal behaviour be heroic when it is performing a vigilante justice that is deemed somehow commendable. But it’s hard to comprehend that a murder can fall into this class of ambiguity. A murderer claims a life; shouldn’t our inherent fear of mortality and our genetic drive to preserve existence immediately mark this act as monstrous? Why is it so common for onlookers to sympathize with—and even heroicize—a murderer, even to the point of turning, once again, on the victim?

It’s a form of victim-blaming, and it happens a lot more than many would like to think. It’s one thing to sympathize with a mental illness that might lead to such an act as murder, or even rape, and even to push for more awareness to better understand the illness, but it is another thing entirely to divert blame from the individual who performed the act to a victim of the act.

A lot of controversy is stirring right now with respect to courtroom treatments of rape victims, for instance—in fact, a very well-known story features a judge who was just relieved of his duty for asking a rape victim why she couldn’t just keep her knees together.

But it is taking an extremely long time to eradicate the public impulse to blame the victim instead of the perpetrator. Even when the evidence is clear, spectators to the incident seem determined to focus blame on the victim and pity the murderer.

There are several reasons for why this might be the case, and the first is difference.

Look at some of the most well-known and undeniably monstrous murder cases in history: Jack the Ripper, The Hillside Stranglers, the BTK Killer, the Milwaukee Cannibal. A lot of the most undeniable monsters we can think of are named something other than their given names. With serial killers, this partly enables them to be identified before their identities are known, but it also creates a persona that can be demonized by the public. These people are not like the rest of us—they are monsters—and their monstrous identities give the public a persona that can be viewed as purely other.

Of course, the complications come when the identity becomes known. We can be certain that Jack the Ripper horrifically killed at least five women—but can we ever be certain who Jack the Ripper really is? No. Because his identity is too human—too like us—to be a true monster. He might have had kids, a job, a wife, or even been on a bowling team—who knows. But all of that is too human and needs to be kept apart. As Wednesday Adams puts it, a homicidal maniac looks just like everyone else, and acknowledging the monstrousness of the man instead of simply acknowledging the monster itself brings us far too close to identifying our own inherent ability to become that monster.

The victim, on the other hand, is different. There is a wound, a weakness, whether it is visible on the exterior or not. It is far easier to blame the victim for making a mistake than it is to acknowledge that someone who looks normal, who we can too closely identify with (unless, of course, he or she can be culturally othered and labelled a terrorist), can be capable of such blatant monstrosity.

It’s imbedded in our inherent psychological foundation: the principle of othering. If we define ourselves against the other, identify ourselves by what we are not and cannot be, then it is far easier to blame the victim than to blame the person whose accountability could implicate our own capability.

It’s a psychological principle that has been explored since horror movies began—horror movies whose censors have simultaneously been exposing our culture’s desire to blame the victim by ensuring those who are murdered first have made some tragic misstep: from promiscuity to alcohol consumption, the blame is there. Those are the characters who can be killed because their faulty actions, no matter how trivial, can take some of the blame away from the killer.

But as the camera lurks through the bushes, moving closer and closer to the apparent on-screen victim, the real fear emerges. We become more and more afraid of the thing that is lying in wait—only the truth is that we are the ones in the bushes, and what really scares us is our own potential desire to enact the murder—to take that bat away from Wendy and clock her with it in The Shining—our own capacity to be the monster, the Edward Hyde that we are desperately trying to suppress.