Corporations shift blame for poisoning onto the victims themselves

Evidence

A spokesperson for the Lead Industries Association placed the blame for childhood lead poisoning on the children themselves: “Dr. Aub told me that children who have sub-normal appetites, or the disease known as ‘pica’ which caused them to chew on inedible articles, were sub-normal to start with!” (Wormser, 1945a). Twelve years later, the LIA’s director of health and safety blamed and disparaged “ignorant parents”: “Of some, but secondary importance is lead paint mistakenly applied by ignorant parents to cribs, play pens and other juvenile furniture and subsequently chewed off and ingested… . Childhood lead poisoning is essentially a problem of slum dwellings and relatively ignorant parents” (Bowditch, 1957). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1773

Categorization

• XREF: Victim-blaming as a rationalization tactic connects to the vault’s authoritarianism claims about attributing social problems to a victimized out-group. — connects to: Cheap hydro power from new dams lured the corporations that poisoned the river — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 96; Corporations apply laxer environmental standards where victims are dark-skinned and poor — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 318
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1773