You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators, and Responsibility, Professor Sharon Lamb offers a sophisticated, multilayered essay approaching such difficult subjects as the definition of victim and of perpetrator. The novelty of her argument lies in the ways in which she uses her definitions to connect individual responsibility with the creation of victims and perpetrators and to connect societal norms with issues such as punishment, recidivism, and
rehabilitation. Furthermore, Lamb accomplishes these seemingly unrelated tasks within the context of a feminist critique of society and the often irresponsible behavior of the individual members thereof. She asks what a victim is, what a perpetrator is, how a society is affected by the respective individuals, and how the respective individual might be helped to change his/her status without losing all connection therewith.
The book begins with an anecdote from the author's life at age six, an anecdote that I found shocking, but that served for me as the basis of Lamb's major thesis. At age six she was being mercilessly tickled by a young boy until, over the course of several years, this boy went further, putting his hand into the girl's panties and fondling her genitals.
The issue here is not whether the perpetrator or the victim is literally to blame. The question here is not the appropriate age during which one becomes responsible for one's actions or inaction, an issue better studied by the developmental psychologist or psychotherapist; the question that is relevant to this book concerns the role of personal responsibility in assigning blame, in the creation of a perpetrator and a victim. One might say that it was the responsibility of the potential victim (let us not be concerned for now with questions concerning age) to assert a boundary, for her own and for the potential perpetrator's information. This is the responsibility (or as the gestalt psychologist cleverly wrote, the response-ability) of both parties: