Editing Victim blaming (section)

===Ideal victim===
{{See also|Victimology}}
An ideal victim is one who is afforded the status of victimhood due to unavoidable circumstances that put the individual at a disadvantage. One can apply this theory to any crime including and especially sexual assault. Nils Christie, a Norwegian criminology professor, has been theorizing about the concept of the ideal victim since the 1980s. In his research he gives two examples, one of an old woman who is attacked on her way home from visiting her family and the other of a man who is attacked at a bar by someone he knew. He describes the old woman as an ideal victim because she could not avoid being in the location that she was, she did not know her attacker, and she could not fight off her attacker. The man, however, could have avoided being at a bar, knew his attacker, and should have been able to fight off his attacker, being younger and a man.<ref name="Christie 1986 17–30">{{cite book|last=Christie|first=Nils|title=The Ideal Victim|publisher=Macmillan Press|date=1986|location=London|pages=17–30|language=en}}</ref>

When applying the ideal victim theory to sexual assault victims, often judicial proceedings define an ideal victim as one who resists their attacker and exercises caution in risky situations, despite law reforms to extinguish these fallacious requirements.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Gotell |first1=Lise |title=Rethinking Affirmative Consent in Canadian Sexual Assault Law: Neoliberal Sexual Subjects and Risky Women |journal=Akron Law Review |date=29 June 2015 |volume=41 |issue=4 |url=https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol41/iss4/3/ }}</ref> When victims are not ideal they are at risk for being blamed for their attack because they are not considered real victims of rape.

A victim who is not considered an ideal, or real victim, is one who leads a "high risk" lifestyle, partaking in drugs or alcohol, or is perceived as promiscuous. A victim who intimately knows their attacker is also not considered an ideal victim. An example of a sexual assault victim who is not ideal is a prostitute because they lead a high risk lifestyle. The perception is that these behaviors discount the credibility of a sexual assault victim's claim or that the behaviors and associations create the mistaken assumption of consent. Some of or all of the blame of the assault is then placed on these victims, and so they are not worthy of having their case presented in court. These perceptions persist in court rulings despite a shift in laws favoring affirmative consent – meaning that the participants in a sexual activity give a verbal affirmation rather than one participant who neither answers negatively nor positively. In other words, affirmative consent is yes means yes, no means no and no verbal answer also means no.<ref name="Randall 2010 397–434">{{cite journal |last1=Randall |first1=Melanie |title=Sexual Assault Law, Credibility, and 'Ideal Victims': Consent, Resistance, and Victim Blaming |journal=Canadian Journal of Women and the Law |date=October 2010 |volume=22 |issue=2 |pages=397–433 |doi=10.3138/cjwl.22.2.397 |ssrn=1742077 |s2cid=143470738 }}</ref>

In addition to an ideal victim, there must be an ideal perpetrator for a crime to be considered ideal. The ideal attacker does not know their victim and is a completely non-sympathetic figure- one who is considered sub-human, an individual lacking morals. An attacker that knows their victim is not considered an ideal attacker, nor is someone who seems morally ordinary.<ref name="Christie 1986 17–30"/> Cases of intimate partner violence are not considered ideal because the victim knows their attacker. Husbands and wives are not ideal victims or perpetrators because they are intimately familiar with each other.<ref name="Randall 2010 397–434"/>