People seem to have this weird idea that there is a limited amount of resoponsibility which has to be shared between the various parties involved in a crime, so that if one gets more the other gets less. That seems absolute nonsense to me.

We all carry seperate responsibility for our own actions. The fact that someone else may have acted in a way that gave us an occasion to do something wrong does nothing at all to let us off the hook.

It's self evident there are ways of behaving that makes us more likely to be the victims of a criminal act. We can leave our car keys in the lock when we pop into the shops, we can walk around with our wallet sticking out of our hip pocket, we can naively give our credit card details to some stranger on the Internet.

When we do that and we get ripped off we are quite right to blame ourselves, and other people are right to blame us as well - but that doesn't in any way reduce the guilt of the thief who takes advantage of our stupidity. And, of course, in no way does it mean that other people who got ripped off, without having made those kind of mistakes, are to blame for what happened to them.

So why do people see it as so different when it comes to the crime of rape? Acting in a way that makes you particularly vulnerable doesn't reduce the legal or moral guilt of the rapist, and shouldn't in any way reduce the penalty imposed, but that doesn't mean it's not pretty stupid. And I'm sure that that is what a lot of those people in that survey meant when they said that in some cases women were, to some extent, responsible for what happened to them.