“If you have an outcome-based approach and you do not reach the goals, then you have to apply additional measures […] whereas now you say okay, I tried, but unfortunately, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted to,” Paulus explained.
Politicians and producers love good ideas that will attract the public’s attention, but should be tweaked just enough to not be executed as intended.
“That immediately causes them to tune out because … that puts their guard up,” she said. “If you were to go to anybody and say, ‘I am telling you this because you are potentially a violent person,’ and that person feels that fundamentally they’re not, that’s going to cause that person to get defensive and tune out. That is something that we’ve seen across all of the research that we’ve done, that the young men on college campuses find that [prevention education] is either completely ‘name, blame, shame’ or is irrelevant to them as men within their campus community.”
The culture of victim blaming creates an enemy instead of focusing on the real issues. And the biggest issue is that we can’t recognize abuse as easily as we believe we naturally do. It’s normal, it’s okay, but it isn’t.