They Must Have Done Something! Socioeconomic Status and Citizens’ Support for the Victims of Violence

ABSTRACT

Why do some victims of criminal atrocities mobilize the public while others do not? I argue that victims’ socioeconomic background systematically biases citizens’ evaluations. I use experimental methods to assess this claim among a representative sample of citizens and elites interviewed during the Mexican war on drugs. I find citizens to be more likely to dismiss victims as responsible for their misfortune when they come from lower socioeconomic strata, and that this bias is concentrated among elite and high-socioeconomic-status citizens. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the psychology of victim-blaming and the origins of justice inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Victim-blaming
• homicide
• executions
• socioeconomic status
• Mexico
• war on drugs
• organized crime
• discrimination
• experiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15564886.2020.1850584.

Notes

1. A victim impact statement is a short recording in which a member of the family of the victim talks about how the crime affected his or her life.

2. In addition to these tens of thousands of low-profile executions, at the time of the survey, Mexicans had been exposed to three high-profile cases. In 2005, businessman Hugo Alberto Wallace was kidnapped and dismembered by his captors; in 2008, the 14-year-old son of the sporting-goods tycoon Alejandro Marti was abducted and executed, and twelve months before the survey, the son of the poet Javier Sicilia was found murdered in the trunk of a car (Padgett, 2011). The survey asked participants if they recalled the name of a victim of organized crime; 90% did not recall any names. The other 10% remembered one of these three high-profile victims (Schedler, 2015), a first sign that the public tends to hold biased information about the victims of a war on drugs.

3. Strata were defined using municipalities’ homicide rates (HR) from 2009 to 2011. The five strata were defined as follows: “very low violence” (HR<6), “low violence” (HR = 6–10), “medium violence” (HR = 10–15), “high violence” (HR = 15–30), and “very high violence” (HR>30). For additional information about the sample, see Schedler (2015). All data analyzed is available at http://datos.cide.edu/handle/10089/17069.

4. For more on this sample, see Schedler’s (2014) report “Élites y violencia organizada” at http://datos.cide.edu/handle/10089/17087

5. Randomization yielded a good balance across samples (See Online Appendix 2).

6. As Online Appendix 3 shows, the results in the paper are robust to estimate linear probability models instead.

7. Fifty-six percent of the public is significantly affected by the treatment in one way or another.