When Rihanna briefly got back together with Chris Brown after he violently assaulted her in 2009, many were quick to condemn her for returning to him. But when victims of domestic abuse often blame themselves for something that is never their fault, as well as feeling the misplaced blame from others, to make them feel guiltier is a pretty warped way of reacting.

Last year, after Ray Rice was filmed being violent towards his partner, the N.F.L chose not to play Rihanna’s track “Run This Town” during an opening-week broadcast, despite Rihanna neither being the perpetrator of violence nor being related to the Ray Rice incident in any way. At the time, she rightly responded with anger on twitter, and Jay-Z echoed the sentiment, saying: “Her response was appropriate. The N.F.L. felt it was a distraction, and she was like, ‘You’re punishing me for what happened with Ray Rice?’”

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Rihanna spoke out about the victim-blaming mentality of society, and how she felt that she was often punished for Chris Brown’s violence by having to always be the ‘poster child’ for domestic violence. “I just never understood that,” she says. “like how the victim gets punished over and over. It’s in the past, and I don’t want to say ‘Get over it,’ because it’s a very serious thing that is still relevant; it’s still real. A lot of women, a lot of young girls, are still going through it. A lot of young boys too. It’s not a subject to sweep under the rug, so I can’t just dismiss it like it wasn’t anything, or I don’t take it seriously. But, for me, and anyone who’s been a victim of domestic abuse, nobody wants to even remember it. Nobody even wants to admit it. So to talk about it and say it once, much less 200 times, is like … I have to be punished for it? It didn’t sit well with me.”

This isn’t the first time that the finger has been pointed at the victim rather than the perpetrator in a high profile dispute. Pop singer Kesha has spent the last year involved in an on going legal battle with her ex-manager Dr Luke, who she says abused her emotionally, physically, and sexually during their ten-year working relationship. Due to the fact she is legally bound to a contract with Dr Luke, she is unable to work with anybody else, which means that she hasn’t been able to release new music since 2013. To make matters worse, record label Sony responded to the claims with a victim-blaming statement that made the assumption that Kesha was lying because she hadn’t reported the abuse in the beginning.

“This admission — that Sebert never spoke of or reported the alleged misconduct — is fatal to each and every one of her claims against Sony and Kemosabe Records," Sony argue. "In short, Sebert cannot have it both ways: She cannot claim that Gottwald intimidated her into silence, then — as an apparent afterthought — seek to hold Sony and Kemosabe Records liable for failing to act on conduct that she did not report." A spokesperson for Dr. Luke added: "If Kesha now regrets her career being mired in legal proceedings, it’s entirely her making."

As writer Aimee Cliff points on in an article that appears in The Fader, “Kesha herself was the voice of the outcast and the downtrodden in pop music; which makes it all the more tragically ironic that the very industry that profited from her songs is now attempting to silence her for speaking up about her own victimhood."

The most worrying thing is, if these public cases of abuse continue to angle blame towards the victim rather than the perpetrator, the one in four women (or one in six men) that currently experience domestic abuse will surely be less likely to come forward to report it. And at a time when two women a week are killed due to such violence, this is not only depressing but dangerous.