‘Men only target vulnerable women’ (and other myths)

Dr. Jessica Taylor • May 05, 2023

‘Men only target vulnerable women’ (and other myths)

One of the biggest lies we’ve ever been fed is that women and girls have an innate vulnerability which causes sex offenders, domestic violence offenders and child abusers to spot them and target them.

I write this blog to dispel this powerful myth, and to reassure millions of women and girls that it wasn’t their ‘vulnerability’ which led to them being beaten up, abused, raped or harmed.

I want to make this argument in six points:

The vulnerability myth is based on some very old, and very shit science
We like to deny our own vulnerability by calling other people ‘vulnerable’
We teach children that only ‘vulnerable’ kids get abused and harmed
We have an oversimplified understanding of abusers and offenders
We don’t know how to tackle the global epidemic of male violence
Vulnerability does not lead to other humans committing crime

The message which I hope to convey is that ‘vulnerability’ is not the cause or the source of the abuse that women and girls are subjected to. Further, we have leant on this explanation so heavily that services, programmes, interventions and policies are based upon it, despite it being incorrect.

The vulnerability myth is based on some very old, and very shit science

Calling women and girls ‘vulnerable’ is so commonplace now, you might not even notice it. You might not notice that when a woman or girl is abused, someone will point out her ‘vulnerabilities’. You might not notice that the conversation often becomes about her background, her personality, her childhood or her understanding.

The truth is that this process of seeking and assessing ‘vulnerabilities’ of women and girls who have been abused and harmed is deeply embedded into social care, psychology, mental health, counselling, policing, legislation, education, law and justice.

To understand how we got to a place where we pick apart the woman or girl and lay out her ‘vulnerabilities’ as reasons for being raped, trafficked, abused or traumatised – we have to look at some of the old theories which have continued to influence our thinking.

One such theory is almost 80 years old, and comes from positivist victimology.

Key theorists in victimology and criminology as far back as 1948 argued that only certain types of people became victims of crime and often brought it upon themselves.

Hans Von Hentig wrote in Time Magazine (1948):

‘Certain characteristics of law-abiding citizens arouse a counter reaction in the criminal. The inexperienced businessman, for example, invites embezzlement; the nagging wife is flirting with murder; the alcoholic is a natural for robbery. Thus, the victim becomes the tempter.’

As you can see from this example, it is theorised that victims ‘tempt’ and ‘arouse’ criminals to commit crimes by being vulnerable, inexperienced – or… a woman.

Spoiler alert: There is a lot of misogyny in vulnerability theories and research.

Later victimology theorists such as Benjamin Mendelsohn and Stephen Schafer also suggested that victims caused crime by being weak, vulnerable, female, old, disabled or young. All three theorists suggested that victims precipitate crime by provoking offenders. Whilst this sounds somewhat outdated, these perspectives are alive and well.

Many theories within psychology and criminology still rely on the assumption that women subjected to sexual and domestic violence either brought the offence on themselves, should have done something to protect themselves, should have behaved in a different way or that their vulnerabilities led to the offender targeting and attacking them.

Victim precipitation theory and research suggests that victims precipitate a crime by their behaviour, vulnerability, character or even the way they walk. This research is still ongoing, and only recently I spoke to an academic who was conducting research into which women were ‘vulnerable’ to being raped by their gait and style of walking.

The argument goes that if a woman or girl walks in a way which is not confident or assertive, she gives off some sort of signal to offenders that she is vulnerable and would therefore be a good target for rape or abuse.

Walking isn’t the only thing which academics have suggested to be a vulnerability in women and girls – everything from their appearance to their childhood has been explored in the literature for decades. There are thousands of articles and studies which seek to name the ‘vulnerability factors’ of women and girls, with the aim of reducing them by changing something about that woman or girl.

Interestingly, the same cannot be said for men who are raped and abused, they are not generally discussed as if they were ‘vulnerable’ to offenders or ‘giving off signals’ to be raped or abused.

It’s as if we see rape as a violent crime when committed against men, but as natural process of taking of an opportunity of a weak person, when rape is committed against women.

The reason that I reject this research and these theories entirely is simple: none of it is true, and if you look hard enough for correlations, you’ll find them no matter what they are.

If I looked hard enough, I bet I could find a correlation between which vegetables women eat and being subjected to violence or abuse by men. The reality is that violence against women and girls is so common, that you can often find correlations that don’t really exist, purely based on how common one of the variables is.

I, and thousands of other professionals, have been working with abused women and girls for decades. Those of us who have done these jobs know that we come across women and girls from every background imaginable. I’ve never seen a particular personality, character, appearance, walk or background that has formed any sort of pattern in the women I have supported.

I’ve supported everyone from female MPs to child victims of trafficking. I’ve worked with lawyers and police officers who were being raped and abused by their husbands at home. I’ve worked with social workers who work in safeguarding teams every day and live in fear of their partners. I’ve worked with women who were experts in martial arts who were raped and beaten up by men. I’ve discussed experiences of abuse and rape with women in the military and women who are now veterans.

Equally, I’ve worked with women who have been in care since they were toddlers. I’ve supported girls who have been trafficked around the country. I’ve worked with girls who have never known a safe place to live and have struggled to get a decent meal.

I can’t think of any ‘vulnerability’ that any of these women or girls had in common. They were a mixture of confident, nervous, strong, terrified, healthy, unwell, believed, ignored, extrovert, introvert, popular, lonely, religious, atheist, old, young, poor, rich, supported and isolated women and girls.

The only thing they had in common was that they were females in a patriarchy, and that means that statistically, they are at constant risk from male violence.

We like to deny our own vulnerability by calling other women ‘vulnerable’

You might be wondering why we go to such efforts to name the vulnerability in the woman or girl.

My work, and the work of many others, explores the concept of ‘denial of personal vulnerability’.

Simply put, this means that we are all vulnerable at some level, but we like to pretend we are not.

We are vulnerable not because of innate characteristics or behaviours, but purely due to how common abuse and rape is. At any given time, any of us could be attacked, assaulted, abused, threatened, groomed or even murdered. But to think in such terms would leave most of us anxious and terrified to live a normal life, so we instead tell ourselves that it would never happen to us, because we are not ‘vulnerable’ like those other women and girls who are raped and abused.

We tell ourselves that we would never be that stupid, never be that trusting, never drink that much, never date that guy, never go to that place. We tell ourselves that we would ‘see the signs’. We tell ourselves that the first time he laid his hands on us, we would be out of the door.

It’s all bullshit, of course. But we like to redirect our own feelings of personal vulnerability by pointing the finger at victims and then picking out their ‘vulnerabilities’. We then say ‘ahhh, that’s why she was raped, well, I would never do that, I would never let that happen to me.’

It’s a defence mechanism. A coping strategy for living in a patriarchy. We blame and name other women and girls as ‘vulnerable’ so we don’t ever have to face the fact that it could happen to us.

This is true even when academics write papers about ‘vulnerabilities’ of women and girls subjected to male violence. The difference is, they get to dress it up with big words, theories and titles so that we all nod and agree. It must be the vulnerabilities of the victims! Of course!

We teach children that only ‘vulnerable’ kids get abused and harmed

We invest a huge amount of time and effort into convincing each other that only the vulnerable will be abused, raped and harmed. This starts early, as early as primary school.

Children are taught in PSHE, assemblies and workshops that only the vulnerable children will be abused or groomed. Resources from everywhere from NSPCC to Barnardo’s have endorsed the myth that only the vulnerable children will be abused, and that if we remove their ‘vulnerabilities’ they will be safe from sex offenders and child abusers.

It’s again, all total rubbish. But that doesn’t stop us from showing children videos, resources and sessions which encourage them to identify the ‘vulnerability’ of the child who is raped and abused. It also doesn’t stop us from constructing entire vulnerability assessments in professional practice which erroneously attempt to identify which vulnerabilities of the child caused the abuse, so we can ‘solve’ them.

A common example of this is when professionals conclude that a girl has been exploited or raped because she didn’t ‘have enough education about consent and healthy relationships’.

This leads to plans around the child which suggest that increasing her knowledge of consent and abuse will protect her from the sex offender who is exploiting her, because once she has more knowledge, she will use the knowledge to defend herself and protect herself better.

This completely ignores the fact that even the most educated professionals who work in abuse every day, are still just as likely to be abused as anyone else. There has been no research which suggests that knowledge of abuse is protective. It is educative at best. This is because power dynamics and the choice to commit violent crime against women and girls has literally fuck all to do with the victim and has everything to do with the motivation and personal choices of the offender.

If we are to tackle this myth, we need to look at why we embed it from such an early age in girls and boys around the world.

We have an oversimplified understanding of abusers and offenders

One of them main issues we have is that whilst we like to scream ‘monster’ and ‘pervert’ and ‘paedo’ at offenders, we don’t actually get taught anything about these men. This leads to serious misunderstandings about offenders who commit domestic and sexual violence offences.

One such misunderstanding is that offenders carefully seek out and then deliberately target the most vulnerable women and girls in society.

This is very easily disproved, especially as direct qualitative research with sex offenders and domestic violence offenders shows that men who commit these crimes target their victims for hundreds of reasons, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with vulnerability.

In interviews, sex offenders have said that they targeted girls because they liked their hair, their tights, their body shape and their smile. Sex offenders report targeting children because they are confident and happy. Some talk about their specific sexual fantasies. Some only target girls of certain ages and ethnicities. Some sex offenders report not caring who their victims are at all, and will rape and abuse any child they can.

When it comes to online sex offending, there is plenty of evidence that sex offenders target children and adults randomly, based on whoever responds first and in a way they want. This means they can literally use a scattergun approach to attack and groom hundreds of victims per day, and never know anything about their so-called ‘vulnerabilities’.

In chat logs of sex offenders abusing children which were analysed by Kloess et al. (2017), most offenders never even asked for details about the child. They were not seeking vulnerabilities to exploit. They were targeting hundreds of different kids. They had very little in common.

With the abuse and grooming of adult women, the same can be said. It is seen as ‘common knowledge’ that abusers target vulnerable women – and yet, many offenders actually target assertive and confident women who spend the rest of their lives wondering how that man managed to grind them down and destroy their sense of self.

The reality is, for lots of misogynists, destroying confident and healthy women is part of the fun. It’s part of the kick they get out of belittling and humiliating her. Why would an offender always target vulnerable women, when they enjoy breaking down women and controlling them?

The vulnerability theory is just myth. It suggests that offenders don’t target or abuse ‘strong’ women, and that if you are a strong woman, it shouldn’t ever happen to you.

This is particularly true for Black women who are generally positioned as strong, aggressive matriarchs due to racism. So it’s even harder for Black women to be seen as victims of abuse and male violence, because we assume they are all ‘strong, assertive’ women who would never be targeted by abusers. There has been much written about this phenomenon, and it deserves a lot more attention. Especially as it exposes so fluently, the stereotypes we use to build the ‘perfect victim’, and what happens when you as a woman, sit outside of that perfect victim stereotype.

If you are not seen as vulnerable or weak, you can often be positioned as a liar or a malicious ex.

It’s almost as if we believe that all victims of male violence must be inherently vulnerable women and girls, and they are not vulnerable, they are not real victims.

We don’t know how to tackle the global epidemic of male violence

This is probably fairly obvious, but we don’t actually know how to (and there is very little appetite for) challenge and end global, systemic male violence.

We did get to a point where we started to take notice of the fact that 97-99% of all violent crime is committed by men globally, and that we had to do something about the way men and boys were being socialised and brought up to regard fighting, violence, sexual power, competition and bullying as masculine traits to aim for.

However, more recently, we have seemingly gone backwards. When we talk about male violence or male crime stats, we are shouted down and told we are misandrists and man-hating feminist bitches, (ironic, but okay).

It seems that if we cannot even publicly address decades of solid evidence and statistics, we definitely cannot work towards tackling male violence yet. As much as I would love to see that for the good of our entire species, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot force it to drink.

Everyone knows the reality of violent crime, but many are reluctant to do anything with it.

We’ve now moved away from holding men responsible (again) and gone back towards positivist theories of victim precipitation and vulnerability. Vulnerability in one humandoes not lead to other humans committing crime

My final message has to be the clearest.

It does not matter how vulnerable a woman or girl is, it never ever ‘causes’ another human with free will to choose to abuse, rape or kill them.

Absolutely nothing inside that victim has any power or effect on the choice-making of an offender.

They are capable and competent adults who make active choices to harm women and girls for one reason:

Because they want to.

You don’t need any other theories. Offenders do it, ultimately, because they want to. That’s why they are able to keep their cool with their boss, or their best mate, or some dickhead they play footy with – but ‘lose their cool’ with their girlfriend at home or abuse little girls.

This isn’t about vulnerability of the woman or girl, it’s about a choice that is made by a misogynistic, violent offender who wants to abuse and harm women and girls (and in some cases, children in general rather than just girls).

Let me explain something to everyone reading this blog:

If vulnerabilities lead to some sort of human arousal or temptation in us to exploit or abuse or kill weaker humans, we would all do it (or at least the majority of us). And yet, not only do the majority of humans not commit these crimes, but women hardly commit any.

Globally, women are only responsible for around 2% of violent crime. So does this mean that victim precipitation theory only applies to male offenders and female victims?

If the vulnerability theories were real, that would mean that if you came across a drunk woman, accidentally separated from her friends and lost in the high street, you would think ‘she’s vulnerable and alone, I could do something to her right now!’

But you don’t, do you?

Most of us have never had a thought like that in our lives.

You might instead see her and think ‘shit, she’s alone, is she okay?’

Or you might approach her and ask her if she’s safe, and where her friends are. You might ring an ambulance or police if needed. You might help her back to somewhere safe like a taxi rank or a bar where her friends were.

That’s because you made a CHOICE.

100 people could walk past her and the majority would see all of her so-called ‘vulnerabilities’ and either try to help her or not stop at all.

And yet a handful may stop and make a choice to harm her, rape her, rob her or kill her.

Her ‘vulnerabilities’ had nothing to do with it. It is all about the active choice making of the offender.

It is ALWAYS the choice of the offender.

Vulnerability of women is just a myth used to distract us from the real cause of male violence: men.

About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor

Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything.

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Britney Spears, The Mickey Mouse Club, and Psychiatry

by Dr. Jessica Taylor • 26 Oct, 2023

The world watched whilst Britney Spears rose to fame dressed in ‘sexy schoolgirl’ uniform dancing in a school gym, singing ‘hit me baby, one more time’. They watched as she become a global phenomenon and sex symbol. They laughed as she was chased endlessly by the press. As she struggled to cope. As she shaved her head. As she struggled to keep custody of her children. As she was sectioned and medicated. As she was forced to perform in Las Vegas whilst being regularly medicated to control and subdue her. As she was locked into a conservatorship for thirteen years by her abusive father. Prior to her solo artist career, she had been a famous child star of Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club along with Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. She regularly performed songs, and dance routines and acted. At fifteen years old, she signed a record deal. I was eight years old when ‘Hit me baby, one more time’ came out. I watched it on the TV and didn’t know she was just a child until much later, when I was an adult working in child sexual exploitation services. I looked back on the video and wondered how old she was when they sexualised her and sold her to the world. I did a quick Google search. Sixteen. I thought about her song titles and music videos. ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ was curiously released on the same album as ‘Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman’ when she was eighteen years old. Interestingly, both produced by Pharrell Williams, the producer of ‘Blurred Lines’ with Robin Thicke – widely considered to be a misogynistic, pro-rape song about objectifying women. In ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ and ‘Boys’ (again on the same album), she is posi- tioned as a sex-crazed woman who will do anything for men. Yet ‘Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman’ positions her as a child, coming of age, and being stuck in between childhood and adulthood. I’m not a girl (Not a girl, not yet a woman) Not yet a woman (I’m just trying to find the woman in me) All I need is time, a moment that is mine While I’m in between Between 1998 and 2001, her management released an incredible number of songs and music videos that clearly portrayed her as sexy, sultry and out of reach. Sometimes, I wonder how much of that was deliberately paedophilic and illegal. The ‘jailbait’ trope. That men knew she was a child, but she was being positioned as a sexual adult. This included being interviewed several times about whether she was a virgin, when she lost her virginity, and whether she had a boyfriend yet. My next strongest memory of Britney was in 2003, when she released ‘Everytime’. The video was harrowing. I was thirteen years old, and even I noticed that something was very wrong. She was singing about pain and trauma. The music video featured her dying of an overdose in the bath and drowning. I watched it with horror. She wanted to die. Her portrayal of suicide was calm, peaceful and final. She is shown as having an out-of-body experience in which she sees herself being pulled out of the bath by a man and rushed to hospital, whilst paparazzi scramble to take pictures of her body. Since she released her memoir, we now know that the final scene was an apology to her aborted baby with Justin Timberlake. This video still haunts me; in fact, it hurts more to watch now than it did then. Here was a very young woman, shot into global stardom, sexualised and sold as a teenage sex object, struggling to cope with the pressure, and now depicting her own death. In 2008, her mother Lynne told the press that her daughter had ‘lost her virginity’ to an eighteen-year-old man when she was just fourteen years old, and way below the age of consent. She had started drinking at thirteen years old whilst working on The Mickey Mouse Club, and had started taking drugs at fifteen years old. In her memoir, Lynne recalls finding cocaine and weed in her daughter’s bag as she was boarding a private jet around the time ‘Baby One More Time’ was released. For some, this might just look like a teenager experimenting, having fun, and pushing boundaries – but to me, it looked like a teenager who was struggling to cope with something; a theme that would continue for another couple of decades. In her book, Lynne looks back on the way she was told by managers and music producers that the only way sixteen-year-old Britney would be able to compete with stars like Mariah Carey would be to sexualise her, and frame her as a ‘Lolita’. She writes that she was told that they wanted to deliberately manage Britney as a teenage sex object, and that Lynne regrets giving up control of her daughter’s career. Less than a year after Lynne gave this interview, in 2007 Britney was filmed having a ‘public breakdown’ and shaving her hair off. A month later, after being hounded by tipped-off paparazzi, she hit a car with an umbrella. This led to global media outlets framing her as violent, psychotic, insane and a bad mother to her children. Despite everything she was going through, and previously being regarded as a national treasure, she was framed as dangerous and disordered. She was then reportedly in and out of ‘rehab’ for years, sectioned several times and placed on psychiatric medication. At the end of 2007, her father, Jamie, placed Britney under a ‘temporary conservatorship’ which lasted over thirteen years. During this time, concerns slowly mounted amongst her loyal fanbase, who believed for years that she was being exploited and controlled. They argued that she was in danger, and being treated like a prisoner. They pointed to evidence on her social media which suggested that she was trying to carefully get messages to her fanbase that she was in danger. In 2009, they created a FreeBritney website, and demanded that her conservatorship was ended. In November 2021, Britney filmed and posted a video to her fan base, and specifically thanked the FreeBritney movement for ‘saving her life’, and ‘noticing that something was wrong’. I started to become interested in Britney’s journey around four years ago, when I noticed that she always looked disconnected in her social media videos and photographs. Her communication seemed odd. Her eye contact and body language weren’t right, and I had commented that she was extremely traumatised, but likely to be taking medication of some sort. I wondered whether she, like many of the women and girls I was working with, was being subjected to the same process of pathologisation and control. In 2019, one of the attorneys in the conservatorship case claimed that Britney was so mentally ill that she was like ‘a comatose patient’ and that she couldn’t make any decisions or sign any statements because she was the equivalent of an unconscious person. I started to feel that my worries were being confirmed. How could she simultaneously be so lacking in capacity that she was the equivalent of a person in a coma, and also be performing at a residency in Las Vegas every single night? How could people around her be claiming that she was so mentally ill that she needed round-the-clock supervision and medication, but she was still well enough to perform for hours? Something wasn’t right. Whilst many laughed off the idea that she was trying to send out messages that she was being abused and controlled as a conspiracy theory, I looked through her social media for hours and found that I agreed with her fanbase. There was something about her social media. The captions seemed strange, but purposeful. Were they being written deliberately by her social media managers to make her look insane? Were they being written by a woman who had been forced to take high dosages of medication? Were they coded messages to her fans, to keep campaigning for her to be released from her conservatorship? Maybe one day we will know the full truth, but in 2020, I wrote on my own social media that I was very worried about where her life was headed, and what the conservatorship was doing to her. I looked back over the life of a girl I had grown up at the same time as, and saw nothing but trauma, fear, confusion, pressure, harassment, abuse and pathologisation. It made sense to me that she struggled so much, but like so many others, she was diagnosed as mentally ill, lost custody of her children and was positioned as disordered and psychotic. The 2021 documentary, Framing Britney Spears, was the first time I had seen an angle taken by mass media outlets (New York Times) which clearly demonstrated that Britney was being abused and exploited. I watched it with my wife and we both cried as we watched the journey of a young girl being controlled and abused, financially exploited and framed to the media as a danger to herself and her children. Not long after, her father has recently announced that he would eventually step down from the conservatorship which controls her entire life, and she has recently been allowed to drive again after over fourteen years of not being allowed to drive her own car. I sincerely hope that the world supports her no matter whether she decides to put them all, or whether she quietly disappears from public life forever. Her life story and case should serve as one of the most public examples of sexualisation, exploitation and pathologisation of women that has ever occurred. Sexy but psycho – the Disney legacy In 2014, I came across a video on YouTube which seemed to suggest that there was a link between the Disney franchise and the sexualisa- tion and then subsequent ‘breakdown’ of female child stars. It wasn’t much, but it was implied. I have been interested in this process ever since. Britney was part of that cohort, but there have been many more girls since her era. As the years have passed, I’ve watched as rising child stars such as Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato and Lindsay Lohan were taken down similar pathways of hypersexualisation and then pathologisation that were publicly discussed, but for some reason, not publicly scrutinised. Well, the girls were scrutinised, of course. Not so much scrutiny was afforded to the managers and corporations who had clearly developed a blueprint for transforming their cute child stars into pornified sex objects overnight. Sometimes it felt like they had deliberately removed their successful female child stars from the limelight for short periods of time and then relaunched them as sex siren pop stars – when they were barely seventeen years old. Miley Cyrus became famous for her starring role in Hannah Montana, in which she played a young famous popstar who has to disguise herself to enable her to live a normal life. However, by the age of fifteen, she was relaunched from actor to solo artist. Her songs were carefully constructed to be sexy, but almost acceptable – a teenager singing about her relationships or her crushes. In 2010, at seventeen years old, her management released ‘Can’t Be Tamed’, a song which describes her as crazy, sexy, wild, damaged, jagged and uncontrollable. In the video, she is dressed as a wild, exotic, sexy animal in a large cage, that rich people have paid to see. She becomes uncontrollable and difficult to tame, the rich people become frightened of her, and so the video is designed to position her as sexy, but out of control. Her clothing is ripped and shredded. Her makeup is dark. Her hair is wild. It is vital to remember that she is not only a child at this point, but is still starring in a Disney children’s programme with a viewership of millions of small children. It is therefore interesting that some critics have speculated that this could be a deliberate process that Disney use to move their young audience towards their pop stars as they age with them. This journey towards sexy, but ultimately, mentally ill, contin- ues for years in her career. By 2013, her music videos regularly showed her almost naked, taking drugs, and being encouraged to be as sexualised as possible. Huge smash hits such as ‘We Can’t Stop’ and ‘Wrecking Ball’ deliberately portrayed her as sexy, but disordered. Naked, but crying into the camera. Beautiful, but aggressive. Laughing but angry. Intoxicated. Exhausted. Messy. Wild. Uncontrollable. Sexy. I also have to wonder what the significance is of Miley crying into the camera with a shaved head in ‘Wrecking Ball’. Why, and how, was she positioned as sexy but psycho? In 2019, tabloids reported that Miley’s family were considering having her sectioned, in order to save her marriage to Liam Hemsworth. A source told the NW that ‘it was clear she was back in a dark place, and her family are telling her to face up to her demons and seek psychiatric treatment before it’s too late. If it saves her marriage, it will be a small price to pay.’ This is particularly distressing to read, considering that around that time she had come out as bisexual, and less than a year later, she came out as lesbian, and was in a relationship with a woman. The tabloids and celebrity gossip blogs continued to position her as acting out, crazy, wild, promiscuous and problematic for years. It was reported by Star that she was ‘acting out’ to ‘get attention’ from her on-off partner, Liam. Heat magazine reported that her relationship with Kaitlynn Carter was a ‘fling’ to ‘get attention’ and that she needed to be sectioned or sent to rehab for ‘social media addiction’. In 2020, NW published a criticism of Miley, claiming that she had a ‘mental breakdown’ due to jealousy about her ex moving on, and that her current partner Cody Simpson was going to have her sectioned or sent to a mental health facility. This targeting of a young woman is not unique, in fact it is a pattern which many young women have been subjected to. Selena Gomez recently announced that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, anxiety and depression having been put through the same process of sexualisation and framing as sexy, but psycho. Again, after being sent to a psychiatric hospital, she was told she was mentally ill. In 2011, after yet another career which took her from Disney child star to sex object popstar in a matter of months, an eighteen-year-old Demi Lovato was ‘sent to rehab’ and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She quickly became the poster child for many mental health organisa- tions looking to ‘raise awareness’ of bipolar disorder. In 2018, she took a near-fatal overdose. However, she gave an interesting interview in 2020, in which she stated that she had been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, and that it seemed easier for doctors to slap a label on her anger and behaviour and tell her it was bipolar disorder. In her own words, ‘bipolar was used as a convenient excuse’ for what was really happening. Similarly to Miley Cyrus, Demi gave an interview in 2021 in which she said ‘I hooked up with a girl and was like, “I like this a lot more.” It felt right.’ She went on to say, ‘I know who I am and what I am, but I’m just waiting until a specific time to come out.’ Demi said that she would feel a ‘visceral reaction to being intimate with men’, and ‘blamed herself for ignoring red flags that she was not heterosexual’. This strikes me as important, that young girls and women who might not even be heterosexual were having their young female bodies exploited, sexualised and moulded for the male gaze by multimillion-dollar corporations – causing serious psychological trauma that would later be diagnosed in terms of psychiatric disorders. Ariana Grande was quickly sexualised as a young teenage girl, and then put through the exact same process as the others. She has spoken publicly about her depression and anxiety, and says that since the terrorist bombing of her Manchester concert in 2017, she hates performing. What is interesting about Ariana’s experiences is that rather than being labelled as bipolar or psychotic like the others, the public sympathised with her trauma from the terrorist attack, and see that as a real, tangible trauma. Instead, then, she was diagnosed with PTSD and her loyal fanbase promised to support her, even if she cancelled her tour dates. Lindsay Lohan, on the other hand, was bullied for years for her public ‘breakdown’ and drug dependency, despite disclosing domestic abuse and other traumas related to child stardom, sexualisation and pathol- ogisation. Lindsay was diagnosed with ADHD after ‘erratic behaviour’, which UCLA have argued is a misdiagnosis, leading her to be treated with Adderall. This drug is known to have similar effects to cocaine and amphetamines. However, she was also diagnosed with bipolar and alcohol dependency, which led to her living for several years on a cocktail of Dilaudid, Ambien, Adderall, Zoloft, Trazadone and Nexium. When she was twenty-four, doctors who felt she had been misdiagnosed helped to wean her off these drugs using careful tapering methods until she was completely medication-free. Her story – of yet more abuse, trauma and pathologisation – is a sobering read. A young child star who was struggling was diagnosed with several psychiatric disorders she never had, medicated for years and then publicly mocked and criticised as crazy and promiscuous: a hot mess. Throughout her childhood, Lindsay was subjected to various traumas. Despite having a complex relationship with her mum, which the tabloids have mocked for over a decade, in 2013 her mother stated to the New York Daily News that her trauma was all connected to things she witnessed and experienced in childhood. This important detail seems to have slipped past the general public, who focus on her wild nights out, legal troubles, financial issues and addiction. Despite there being a possible root of her trauma, it has been ignored for decades. Even after all of the years have passed, she has stated several times in interviews that she has been harassed and lied about. In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2016, Lindsay stated that her her mobile phone number had been shared on the internet, and several news outlets had been told that she was pregnant. But it wasn’t just the constant reports in the media. In 2016, footage surfaced which appeared to show Lindsay being assaulted on a public beach in Greece. In the video which was widely circulated, she ran from the attack to be followed, grabbed, exposed and forced away. It should be becoming painfully clear by now that what we are witnessing is a pattern of rising fame, sexualisation and then pathologisation of women and girls who are in fact being subjected to abuse, trauma and stress, and struggling to find how to cope, and who they really are in an industry which expects them to be happy, sexy, heterosexual objects of desire for men. Speaking of sexuality, Lindsay is yet another woman subjected to years of pathologisation who has had long relationships with men and women. Her relationship with DJ Samantha Ronson between 2008 and 2010 was met with scepticism, jokes and even outrage in the press. It is little wonder that she denied it and refuses to confirm whether she is bisexual or not. Sadly, I have come across several LGBT outlets who published articles and blogs blasting her for ‘bi-erasure’, ‘harming bisexual people’ and ‘denying being queer’ which seem to have very little insight into how traumatic and frightening it might be for her to talk openly about her sexuality after years of press harassment, ridicule and male violence. Whilst I have focused on Disney stars here, it would be wholly inac- curate to state that this journey is limited to their franchise. The ‘Sexy but Psycho’ blueprint has led to the abuse, harm and death of many women including Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Kate Spade, Carrie Fisher, Anna Nicole Smith, Peaches Geldof, Bobbi Kristina Brown and Tina Turner. I know how that list might look to some, but maybe it is time we take a step back and reanalyse the lives and deaths of these women? All of them struggled with their traumas, stress, abuse or pressure of some kind. All of them were, at some point, positioned as wild, out of control, mentally ill, problematic or attention seeking. Instead of a humanistic response to what had been done to them, the public were encouraged to laugh along, gossip, harass them and speculate about their ‘breakdowns’.