Victims and Victimhood by Trudy Govier (original) (raw)
Related papers
Free the Victim: A Critique of the Western Conception of Victimhood
International Review of Victimology, 2009
In Western languages those affected by crime are universally labelled as ‘victims’, meaning the sacrificed ones. According to the author this practice seems to originate from the association of the plight of victims with the suffering of Jesus Christ. In his view, the victim label, although eliciting compassion for victims, assigns to them a social role of passivity and forgiveness that they may increasingly find to be restraining. He analyses the narratives of eleven high-profile victims such as Natascha Kampusch, the couple McCann and Reemtsma to illustrate this thesis. The article continues with a critical review of biases deriving from the unreflexive adoption of the victim label in various schools of thought in victimology and criminal law. Finally, the author argues for the introduction of stronger procedural rights for crime victims in criminal trials and for a new focus within victimology on processes of victim labelling.
Tragedy of Victimisation Rhetoric 15HarvHumRtsJ1.pdf
The victim subject is a transnational phenomenon. It occurs, at least within legal discourse, in both the "West" and the Third World. However, the Third World victim subject has come to represent the more victimized subject; that is, the real or authentic victim subject. Feminist politics in the international human rights arena, as well as in parts of the Third World, have promoted this image of the authentic victim subject while advocating for women's human rights. In this Article, I examine how the international women's rights movement has reinforced the image of the woman as a victim subject, primarily through its focus on violence against women (VAW). I use the example of India to examine how this subject has been replicated in the post-colonial context, and the more general implications this kind of move has on women's rights.
Collapse of the Regime of Victimhood
SEMINAR 727 March, 2020
How and why have groups of people come to identify themselves as victims? How and why do states, social movements and other kinds of social interventionists recognize and work with communities and groups of people as victims? My departure from works like Empire of Trauma is that while the latter primarily concerns itself with trauma and its relation to claims for restitution, I seek to locate the origins of victimhood in a wider sense as a political stance, and how it has evolved in relation to a particular form of governance that emerged under colonialism.
Dialogue, 2016
Who speaks for the victims if the victims can't speak for themselves? This is the central question of the theory of the subaltern subject after Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. 1 But in François Laruelle's General Theory of Victims , this question is scarcely asked, since Laruelle is so concerned with describing the master/slave relationship, in French intellectual culture, between what he calls "embedded" or "media" intellectuals (think: Bernard-Henri Lévy) (50-63) and the victims they purport to represent ("the victim[s]-inperson," 12-29)-that is, the relationship between "the intellectual and 'his' victim" (1-11)-that the victims hardly speak. This is unfortunate, because the frustrating problem with French intellectual discourse is precisely this tendency to speak to or through the subjects it purports to represent. And although Laruelle is concerned to counteract this tendency, it is questionable whether he, too, does not contribute to the silencing of the victims whom he presumes to speak for and represent. Western philosophy, Laruelle suggests, has been characterized, since always, by its solicitude for the victims. The Greek philosophers' fascination with Socrates, the Christian theologians' fascination with Jesus Christ, and, especially, the Jewish philosophers' fi xation upon Holocaust victims, are simply superfi cial manifestations, Laruelle argues, of a deeper complicity between the Western metaphysical structure of master and slave, and the self-perpetuating cycle of victimization. Western philosophy has aided and abetted that self-perpetuating cycle, which Laruelle claims a general theory of victims can help to subvert or overturn, as part of the broader attack on Western philosophy carried out by what he calls 'non-standard philosophy' or 'non-philosophy.' "Victims," Laruelle argues, "ought to be ethically assisted by 'non-philosophical' rather than [by]
Victimology Between the Local and the Global
2010
This special issue is about victimization as a very personal experience that is profoundly susceptible to communal forgetting. It includes an important quantitative contribution in the conventional routine activities theory tradition. At the same time, it challenges conventional victimological examinations, while raising critical race, class and gendered issues. The essays herein help us to see more abstract architectures of routine activity that channel whole societies and the entire global community to see victimization or to be wilfully blind to it; to classify victimization into legal categories that neuter it or that acknowledge it; that silence victims or listen to them; that promote collective amnesia or collective memory and to propose new critical lenses to the study of victimology. To connect local experience of victimization to global transformation at least several loops of learning are needed. Perhaps the art of liberating victims is figuring out how to link local loops of learning from personal stories to more encompassing loops through events like national enquiries, up to institutions like the International Criminal Court. When national loops of learning wilfully obstruct international learning from the experience of victims, victim advocates must figure out how to by-pass obstructive intermediate communication loops. They must use modalities like the internet and NGO networks to connect to different loops of communication that will take their experience more seriously. Victimology between the local and the global aims at challenging globalized and localized workings of power, by offering localized voices of victims that allow theorizing bottom up. Yet, and at the same time, it hopes to challenge localized architectures and geographies of power that construct and re-produce victimization, while offering larger theoretical critical directions.