(A long) introduction
We have recently published a paper “Victim blaming in police road injury prevention messages? A case of bicycle helmets” in Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour.
We were interested to know whether mentioning bicycle helmets in a police preventive message is victim blaming by default. As some of our colleagues repeatedly claim on Twitter. So, we examined the perceived level of victim blaming in six hypothetical scenarios. Three scenarios described traffic situations and three several other crimes.
The results of our study “suggest that if advice on injury or crime prevention measures is delivered carefully, while also acknowledging the guilty party or wider context, people will not perceive such messaging as victim blaming.” So, it appears that mentioning bicycle helmets in a police preventive message is NOT victim blaming by default.
Perhaps our interpretation of the results is wrong. That is always possible, but as we wrote in the paper “The full text of scenarios is presented in the article, which allows readers to critically assess the possible level of victim blaming.” So, please be free to analyze each scenario and provide argumentation about why you disagree with our conclusions.
We have been accused…
Our paper had been rejected twice before being published in TRF. Some of the reviewers’ comments in previous journals were useful and constructive and I believe our paper improved. However, some reviewers were extremely hostile. Here is what one of them wrote: “Fifth, the way that the authors draw conclusions from their findings, gives a strong impression of a goal-oriented study.”
In other words, the reviewer accused us that we “wanted to make a point” rather than honestly testing a hypothesis.
… of something others admit doing
Now we go to a study (“Motonormativity: how social norms hide a major public health hazard”) that became one of the favorite on cycling Twitter. The study showed that we live in a car-centric society (oh yes, I agree 100%) and “provides evidence of how driving automatically receives systematically biased treatment across society so as to favour the needs of a majority – an effect we term motonormality.”
I am not going to criticize the study, at least not now, I will instead point out something else. In a recent presentation, one of the authors of that study, when talking about the motivation for making it said that “…sometimes you do science to make a point.”
So, this author basically says, to borrow the words of our hostile reviewer, that they conducted a goal-oriented study.
Can you see where the problem is?
Our paper gets rejected because an anonymous reviewer accused of conducting a goal-oriented study, while the author who admitted doing exactly that gets praised on cycling Twitter and elsewhere.
And this is the main problem with the active travel community. They are willing to accept, praise, and forgive everything if the results or “results” of a scientific study support and reinforce their beliefs, while on the other hand, they will engage in hostile and unethical behavior toward work (and its authors!) that does not support their beliefs. I have written about such behavior several times before on this blog, but I am afraid things are getting much worse.