Читать книгу Approaching Victimology as social science for Human rights a Spanish perspective - Gema Varona Martínez - Страница 16

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a victim is defined as a person who has been attacked, injured, or killed as the result of a crime, a disease, an accident, etc. In the Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary (23rd edition), the first meaning of “víctima” is a person or animal sacrificed or meant to be sacrificed1. Only in its fifth meaning is there a concrete reference to a person who suffers a crime. As van Dijk (2008) explains:

“victim” is not a derivative of the verb vincere but of the unrelated Latin word for sacrificial object, victima. “Victim” is, for example, used in Latin versions of the Bible to denote a sacrificial animal. The victim is someone or something slaughtered and offered as a sacrifice to the gods (p. 13).

According to van Dijk, the use of the word “victim” to refer to victims of crime seems to be a quite modern one, coming from the humanization of the stories of the Passion of Christ and a growing understanding of the psychological mechanisms of scapegoating, although this interpretation has been debated (Galona, 2018; van Dijk, 2020) and might not work for other non-Western languages.