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Yeah, the difference between victim blaming and victim warning is whether you think public policy and social norms should be shaped to protect victims as much as possible.
You can want that and also warn victims, or you can 'warn' victims as an alternative to doing that.
OP seems to be pretty explicitly saying that those things should be shaped to protect victims less, and place the burden of self-defense on the victims instead. That's not 'warning.'
I'm not sure I understand your view here. Warning victims seems like it would fall pretty squarely under protecting victims as much as possible, even if it isn't the only thing that would fall under that heading.
Maybe this is an example of two movies on one screen, but I didn't get that impression from the OP at all. OP isn't saying that public policy and social norms shouldn't be shaped to protect victims, but rather that the current attempts to do that are not very effective and are needlessly narrow in scope.
IANAL, but I think in legal terms I would be referring to mens rea.
Basically, you cannot distinguish whether or not someone is victim blaming from the simple fact of 'they mentioned something women could do to be safer'; that is an act that both victim-blamers and victim-defenders might do. What determines it is how that warning falls into their larger worldview on the topic, and what they are intending to accomplish with the warning.
If your view is 'society as a whole needs to do everything it can to protect potential victims, and giving them important knowledge about how to avoid danger is one part of that effort', you're not a victim-blamer and your warnings are fine and good.
If your view is 'people need to take individual responsibility for their own safety, we should educate them about the dangers but if they don't protect themselves after that then it's on their own heads,' then you are a victim-blamer, and your warnings are kind of sinister and instrumentally harmful.
Is it confusing that the same action can be good or bad depending on the intent behind it and the larger framework it is embedded in? Yeah, it sure confuses the shit out of me all the time! But that's unfortunately just true sometimes in the highly complicated realms of society and culture and politics, and us high-decouplers just have to acknowledge that reality and do the hard work of thinking about it.
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