I want to thank you for sharing your perspective and experience. And I'm sorry you've had to endure all that bull****.
It's hard, it really is, once you've experienced something bad, to balance that line of "I did not deserve that" and "How can I prevent a similar situation in the future?" because they are so fundamentally opposing. It is so so so common for people to do exactly what you're doing, to uphold the Just World fallacy, because that makes the world make sense again, and it gives you a feeling of control.
And frankly, there is some truth in it. You could've always done something (even something as ridiculous as "didn't leave the house that day"), and sometimes bad things are a result of genuinely bad decisions.
But we have this weird thing when we're victimized by other people, to take on extreme amounts of guilt and responsibility. Even if we accept that bad things like rape and robbery are basically unavoidable forces of nature that will never entirely disappear, we put them in a different category. Is someone to blame for a tsunami? Catching a disease? Do we wrack ourselves with guilt when they happen to us?
No, at least not to the same degree. We accept that statistically, someone will be hurt, and it ****ing sucks that it was us this time. Our actions were still the most reasonable ones we could take, but that didn't make them perfect.
Or at least we have a somewhat easier time coming to that conclusion when it's an experience less fraught with controversy.
It's interesting to hear this other perspective. I've never been asked that question in a way that I didn't interpret positively, but, well, people are different, and in long-term relationships you can take SO MUCH for granted in terms of consent and communication styles.