Victimhood as a social and political strategy.

One of the worst developments in our society is the rise of victim culture. The problem is that victim status has been given an undue degree of currency in modern political and social discussions for a number of reasons. You can easily see this in social and political discussions where someone will stand up and say things that affirm their victimhood before they even attempt to talk about an issue. Some examples might be:

“as a victim of unjust persecution,”
“As a survivor of abuse”
“as Jewish, trans, black women”
“as someone who has been the victim of a crime”

Furthermore, we are often told that we should let “victims” be the ones to lead the conversation on issues like crime, sexual abuse, racism, sexism, health care, gun violence, and a number of other topics too numerous to mention. A clear example of this comes from Allison Randall, the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Violence Against Women, who said:To empower survivors to take the lead in addressing domestic violence, sexual abuse, relationship violence and stalking, we need to create spaces where their voices are central to shaping the solutions.”

In our culture, the victim is thought to have something approaching moral authority and pristine knowledge about the issues surrounding the situation that caused their victimization. This leads to a situation where the person is thought to have some kind of special insight into how the problems arise, and the moral wisdom to determine what solutions are acceptable, what kinds of interventions are sufficient, and what restitution, if any, is needed. The intuition here seems to be that victims have a front-row seat to their own situation, and therefore the best vantage point to determine what they need to recover from their terrible circumstances. So we end up with a “victims know best” mentality that says that victims know best why things happened to them, victims know best what support they need, and victims know best what justice will look like. This gives the victim a prominent place in the conversation, allowing them to determine what kinds of solutions are considered and what solutions are deemed “not enough.”

And here the problem begins.

That “victims know best” is something that is claimed and never proven. We are never told exactly what to think about victims knowing best about the cause of their victimization and how to prevent it from happening again. Many of the situations that lead to someone becoming a victim have causal antecedents that are extraordinarily complex, and understanding the causes that lead someone to become a victim is extraordinarily difficult. It is simply not the case that being a victim means that someone knows or understands all of the causes that led to their victimization.

Here’s a simple example that illustrates this:

In the 80’s and 90’s there were a number of people who were abused, robbed, beaten, murdered and ripped off by organized crime in New York City. These people certainly deserve our sympathy, but it would be a huge mistake to think that these people are capable of understanding the factors that lead to the rise of violent organized crime in NYC. Questions like “why do young men join gangs,” “what is the internal incentive structure that allows the Mafia to function,” and “how are highly complex money laundering operations carried out” are not easy to answer, and the fact that someone has been a victim of organized crime does not equip him to answer these questions well. If one wants to understand organized crime, there are a whole host of social, cultural, economic and legal factors that one must understand before one can adequately explain why organized crime has emerged in a certain way and taken a certain form in a certain community. It is a mistake to think that someone who is a victim of mafia activities has all aspects of the situation mapped out and therefore knows best how to respond to increasing mafia activities.

The second problem is closely related to the first. When someone is a victim, we often think that part of the harm they suffer is a loss of agency and that part of the recovery process is to give the victim back a sense of agency as a way of combating the feelings of helplessness that can accompany victimization. Giving the victim a voice in the process of justice and in the process of determining the social and political response to the pathology that was the source of one’s victimization is often seen as a matter of justice insofar as it gives the victim back a sense of agency that was taken away. We want victims to feel that they are no longer helpless and have to stand by and watch things happen to them, so we give them a chance to be active participants in the response to the social ill in question. However, because victimization has such a strong social value, people are often much more subservient to the wishes of the victim than is warranted. This can lead to recovery attempts that adopt a course of action that the victim likes or suggests, even when that course of action is counterproductive and unhelpful.

The third problem arises when the first two problems are identified.

There is often a moral stigma attached to questioning a victim’s epistemic and moral authority regarding the causes of their victimization, and there is often an equally strong stigma attached to refusing to follow the course of action that a victim would prefer. This leads to a situation in which a victim’s knowledge and authority remain unquestioned even when they step outside the realm of what they actually know and understand. For this reason, victims are given far more influence when it comes to selecting solutions to social problems than they should be. To put it bluntly, there is a strong social incentive not to question a victim’s knowledge claims or moral authority, and thus people with victim status who may not understand all of the social, cultural, and economic issues at play around a particular social problem may still be given an outsized voice in determining how society responds to that social problem.

This can lead to a political strategy in which cynical operators use the stigma surrounding victim criticism as a tactic to silence or discredit opponents. Bad faith activists can use a victim narrative to undermine objections to a chosen course of action by getting a victim to endorse that course of action. Once a particular solution has been endorsed by a victim, any objection to that course of action can be used as evidence that the objector is heartless, cruel, and “victim blaming.”

It goes without saying that this doesn’t help anyone.

There are a great many difficult social problems that need to be solved, and they will not be solved by simply outsourcing the solution to the victims of those social problems. Being a victim of a social pathology does not mean that someone has insight into the cause or solutions to that social pathology. Many social problems are insoluble, and more often than not the best responses to those social problems involve trade-offs rather than solutions. While it may appeal to our sense of justice to let “victims take the lead,” there is often no justification for doing so. While it is important to give voice to the effects of injustice and to allow a victim to explain how he or she has been affected by various social pathologies, it does not follow from this principle that victims have the moral authority and knowledge necessary to determine the best course of action in response to those questions.

I have no problem with victims being given the opportunity to tell their stories and advocate for social change; it’s important to hear from people who have been harmed by various social pathologies. The problem comes when a person’s victim status is so elevated that it has the effect of shutting down or silencing debate, or results in cynical actors using their victim status to test the empathy of people who disagree with a victim’s proposed solutions. Using victimhood as a shield for bad ideas, as a method of shutting down debate, or as a tool to create social stigma around objecting to the specific solutions that victims favor is a great way to ensure that problems remain unresolved.

Part

Honestly,

Wokal_distance.