Читать книгу Approaching Victimology as social science for Human rights a Spanish perspective - Gema Varona Martínez - Страница 18

According to Chanel Miller (2020), victim and author of the book Know my name, she is a victim needing and claiming the social acknowledgement of having suffered an underserved harm, but the problem with the term “victim” comes when saying that “she is a victim of the aggressor” meaning that she is mainly a victim attached and reduced to a concrete event, when she is and will be much more than that, and meaning that the aggressor is the active role in those happenings and its aftermath when she is the survivor holding an agentic role beyond mere sorrow and secondary victimisation of the criminal justice system. As mentioned before, to avoid patronising, encapsulating or passivity connotations, some victims or support/activist groups prefer the term survivor or harmed/victimised persons instead of the term “victim” (Romero-Sánchez et al., 2021). In any case, some victims do not survive, for example in the most extreme cases, the direct victims of a murder. Apart from those cases, some academics do not agree with the connotations of the translation of the term survivor to other languages. For example, think in Spanish, about the terms “sobreviviente” or “superviviente, which suggest barely living (instead of fully living).

In some restorative justice literature, the terms “responsible person” and “the harmed person” are preferred by some authors to avoid stigmatisation (Aldington et al. 2020) and to favour full reintegration of both into society.

Image 10: Person harmed/person responsible handmade paper from shredded case notes, Clair Aldington, 2017

As indicated in other works (Varona, 2021)2, a victimisation process is not just an objective or mere descriptive concept for the different experts in the field, these being philosophers, psychologists, criminologists or lawyers. When they perceive and study that victimisation the experts themselves –as part of society– are affected by another process: victimhood. Victimhood is a more concrete concept, where micro and macro elements converge simultaneously. It refers to the process of social (including academic and legal) recognition of the condition or status of being a victim. Victimhood is also unequally distributed in society. Furthermore, both processes (victimisation and victimhood) are related to each other because if victimhood is denied or transformed into victimism, secondary victimisation occurs and contexts for multiple victimisation (revictimisation or poly-victimisation) are created.

Victimhood seems to work better if vulnerability can be attributed to the victim. In today’s social and legal terms, the notion of vulnerability is being used in symbolic, extensive, hierarchical and patronising ways. For example, under the European Union Directive 2012/29 on the rights of victims, apart from minors who are considered per se victims, anyone could qualify to be considered “vulnerable” under the criteria of the severity of the crime, the kind of victim-offender relationship, the place where the crime has been committed, or the socio-demographic profile of the victim3. However, once again, the law in the text contrasts with the real experiences of victims, particularly the unseen ones, who when approaching the criminal justice system in search of protection and justice usually end up experiencing secondary victimisation (Fundamental Rights Agency, 2019). Besides, the notion of vulnerability, as employed today in the social and legal arena, tends to forget social issues. Social vulnerability expresses having been placed in a situation where the rights of some collectivities, some already disadvantaged, might be violated. It is not only about applying criminological theories of rational choice or opportunity theories. The core of the matter lies in embracing paradigms focused on political, economic, social and cultural aspects, as critical and radical victimologies suggest. In this regard, Fattah (2019) talks about “cultural victims”, victims considered “appropriate” and others whose victimisation is promoted, discarded or not condemned within the culture of the majority.

In opposition to the lack of victimhood, we can find the notion of victimism. Victimism means unfairly claiming victimhood or demanding rights unduly related to the consequences of victimisation. Victimism has been related to exclusionary identity politics, including attacks on the freedom of expression (Campbell and Manning, 2018) and antagonistic memorialisation practices. Dean (2016) has questioned current criticism of victim studies, described as a celebration of injury and a desire to be a victim to gain social status. This growing critical perspective ends up questioning the credibility of many real (and usually unseen) victims. For this very reason, Dean (2016) calls our attention towards the impact of cultural ideals of good and bad victims, traditionally linked to the concept of the ideal victim (Christie, 1986; Duggan, 2018). Still, not only the concept but the term itself, “victim”, is questioned today from very divergent standpoints. For example, as mentioned above, when commenting on the victim labelling theory, Jan van Dijk (2019) traces the criticism back to its religious etymological meaning at the time of the Reformation. Van Dijk argues that the term victim holds an instrumental communitarian vision of unjust suffering.

Concerning victimism, while the overuse of the concepts of trauma and vulnerability have been criticized for their diffuse4 and individualist approach in clinical psychology (Furedi, 2004), alternative notions about victimisation have emerged, sometimes in contradictory terms, to put the focus on empowerment, altruistic growth, social suffering, harm and zemiology (Boukli and Kotzé, 2018). Specifically, we can wonder whether survivor or overcomer might be a better alternative name (Ben-David, 2020), taking into account a so-called positive perspective (Ronel and Toren, 2012). This perspective might have the potential of avoiding victimism and paternalism, but it may also entail the risk of banalising the impact of victimisation in terms of depth and length of suffering and, perhaps, favouring individualistic and blaming approaches.