Victim compensation now plays a central role in dealing with harm. It can be brought into play by various devices: private or social insurance, the courts or special funds created for specific disasters. With each device, compensation raises complex evaluation issues: is it appropriate to use financial compensation to repair harm? Who should pay and on what basis should the compensation be awarded? What is the nature of the damage? How to evaluate it and how to value the amount of (...) compensation determined? These questions are the subject of intense work of evaluation by both those who create or implement the compensation devices and by those who use them. This article looks more specifically at this work of evaluation by people who have endured a collective disaster and who have had to deal with the devices designed to compensate them. (shrink)

This study explores the dark side of leadership, treats creative self-efficacy as a mediator, and frames supervisor bullying and employee creativity in the context of social cognition and social comparison. We theorize that with a high social comparison orientation, the combination of high supervisory abuse toward themselves (own abusive supervision) and low supervisory abuse toward other team members (peer abusive supervision) leads to a double whammy effect: When employees are “singled out” for abuse, these victims suffer from not only (...) low creative self-efficacy due to supervisory abuse but also low supervisory creativity ratings. Results based on our two-wave data collected from multiple sources—253 employees and their 77 immediate supervisors—support our theory. The significant three-way interaction effect reveals that when social comparison orientation is high and peer abusive supervision is low (Time 1), own abusive supervision (Time 1) creates the strongest negative impact on creative self-efficacy (Time 2), which is significantly related to supervisory low creativity rating (Time 2). Our discoveries of egregious bullying offer provocative theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to the fields of leadership, abusive supervision, creativity, and business ethics. (shrink)

This paper addresses three commentaries on Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights. In response to Vittorio Bufacchi, it argues that asking victims to tell their stories needn't be coercive or unjust and that victims are entitled to decide whether and under what conditions to tell their stories. In response to Serene Khader, it argues that empathy with victims' stories can contribute to building a culture of human rights provided that measures are taken to overcome (...) the implicit biases and colonialist interpellations she identifies. In response to Andrea Westlund, it proposes a taxonomy of types of narrative closure and offers some arguments to strengthen her view that empathy with victims' stories endows audience members with a new reason and new motivation to support human rights. (shrink)

This paper discusses Diana Meyers's book in light of postcolonial feminist insights. It argues that though Meyers's defense of empathy is admirably sensitive to the ways philosophical concepts and popular discourses can undermine our empathetic capacities, building a human rights culture requires attention to the relational and distributional dimensions of empathy. Meyers's criticism of the expectation of moral purity from victims attests to the richness of her work on agency and helps dismantle unduly narrow conceptions of who counts as (...) a victim of a human rights violation. Meyers's argument for empathy over sympathy is especially useful for understanding culturally encoded forms of degradation. However, human rights violations are caused not only by empathy deficits; they are caused also by empathy excesses toward some people and savior mentalities that can coexist with empathy. Empathy should be supplemented by a political analysis that helps us identify the causes of global injustice. (shrink)

Major depressive disorder is one of the most common serious illnesses worldwide; the disease is also among those with the lowest rates of treatment. Barriers to access to care, both practical and psychological, contribute significantly to these low treatment rates. Among such barriers are regulations in many nations that require a physician’s prescription for most pharmacological treatments including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These rules are designed to protect patients. However, such regulations involve a tradeoff between the welfare of “visible” (...) victims, who might suffer negative consequences from a lack of regulation, and the well-being of invisible “victims,” who likely experience negative consequences that result from increased barriers to care. This article explores these tradeoffs and argues in favor of shifting SSRIs from prescription-only to over-the-counter status. (shrink)

Victim's Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights takes on a set of questions suggested by the worldwide persistence of human rights abuse and the prevalence of victims' stories in human rights campaigns, truth commissions, and international criminal tribunals: What conceptions of victims are presumed in contemporary human rights discourse? How do conventional narrative templates fail victims of human rights abuse and resist raising novel human rights issues? What is empathy, and how can victims frame their (...) stories to overcome empathetic obstacles and promote commitment to human rights? How can victims' stories be used ethically in the service of human rights? The book addresses these concerns by analyzing the rhetorical resources for and constraints on victims' ability to articulate their stories and by clarifying how their stories can contribute to enlarged understandings of human rights protections and deepened commitments to realizing human rights. It theorizes the normative content that victims' stories can convey and the bearing of that normative content on human rights. Throughout the book, published victims' stories-including stories of torture, slavery, genocide, rape in wartime, and child soldiering-are analyzed in conjunction with philosophical arguments. This book mobilizes philosophical theory to illuminate victims' stories and appeals to victims' stories to enrich the philosophy of human rights. (shrink)

Victims of oppression often disagree amongst themselves on how best to respond to their oppression. Often, these disagreements are cast as disagreements about what strategies of resistance would be most effective. In this article, I argue that victims have a wider repertoire of responses to their oppression which reflect the different underlying reasons they have to respond. I outline three distinct reasons for action—self-respect, assistance, and justice—and the respective responses to oppression—rejection, assistance, and resistance—that these reasons call for. (...) I then provide some general comments on how these distinct reasons and responses relate to one another. Appreciating a wider repertoire of reasons and responses can illuminate the nature of disagreement amongst victims, points to the unavoidability of conflict, and provides for a more nuanced understanding of resistance and its alternatives—an understanding that can aid in better responding to injustice. (shrink)

While victimization is as old as human history, the notion of victimhood as currently understood is a relatively recent phenomenon. Over the last several decades, the notion of victimhood has been increasing discussed both within academia and the wider public, a trend that has intensified in recent years. In order to gain a clearer vision of this social phenomenon, the current piece follows the lead of Georg Simmel, and identifies a new Simmelian social type—the Victim. After discussing Simmel’s understanding of (...) social types and tracing the origins of the Victim, we examine some of the characteristics of this new social type. While the Victim is best understood on a high level of abstraction—as are all social types—a richer appreciation of the emergence and nature of the Victim will help us to better understand current discussions around victimhood in both academia and the wider public. These philosophical and sociological reflections on the nature of the Victim can thus be of help for better understanding a social phenomenon of considerable importance in today’s world. (shrink)

This essay begins with a Berlin memorial to the victims of National Socialist “euthanasia” killings first unveiled in 2014. The open-air structure was the fourth such major public memorial in the German capital, having followed earlier memorials already established for Jewish victims of Nazi atrocity in 2005, German victims of homosexual persecution in 2008, and Sinti and Roma victims in 2012. Planning for the systematic persecution and extermination of at least 300,000 infants, adolescents, and adults deemed (...) “life unworthy of life” long preceded and extended beyond the 12-year Nazi period of massacre linked to other victim groups. Yet those constructing collective memory projects in Berlin appear to consider these particular victims as an afterthought, secondary to the other groups. Rather than address the commemorations themselves, this essay addresses the sequence in which they have appeared in order to demonstrate a pattern of first-victimized/last-recognized. I argue that the massacre of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others had to come into legal jurisprudence, scholarship, and public memory projects first before the murdered disabled body and its related memorialization could be legitimized as a category of violence important in and of itself. I argue further that the delay is rooted in a shared trans-Atlantic history that has failed to interrogate disability in terms of the social and cultural values that categorize and stigmatize it. Instead, the disabled body has been seen as both a physical embodiment of incapacity and a monolith that defies historicization. An examination of the broader foundation behind delayed study and representation that recognizes the intersection of racism and ableism allows us to reconfigure our analysis of violence and provides fertile ground from which to make connections to contemporary iterations still playing out in the present. (shrink)

The costs of anthropogenic environmental change are usually discussed in broad terms, for example embracing damage to the ecosystem or buildings. There has been little consideration of the direct human dimension – the cost to and of environmental victims – except in clinical terms. In order to prevent and minimise environmental victimisation it seems necessary to present cost arguments to governments and commerce. This paper outlines the personal, social and cash costs of environmental victimisation, using the psycho-social literature, and (...) brief case studies of intellectual disability, road transport and cross-border pollution. It is proposed that governments and commerce might not respond in obvious ways to these cost arguments, but 'trust' is identified as a cost that both may recognise. It is concluded that the concept of loss-costs should be central to any analysis, and the paper provides a 'Framework for comprehensive argument of the costs of environmental victimisation', in the form of a simple matrix. (shrink)

This paper sketches the emergence of, and shifts within, the social, legal, and political figurations of sex workers in Poland. By adopting a genealogical perspective, I investigate how sex workers have been (re)constituted as subjects of governance and unimaginable social justice claimants in legislation, political debates, and law enforcement strategies. With a broad temporal scope, this article traces continuities, transformations, and disruptions within modes of sex work governance in Poland from the adoption of the first laws relating to sex work (...) enacted during the early 19th century to the present day. Through analysis of policy documents, scholarly work on the history of sex work policies in Poland, and personal accounts by sex workers, I identify and examine two dominant discursive and legal figurations of a sex worker: as a threat, and as a victim in need of rescue and protection. While analysing the emergence of and interplay between these two figurations, this article demonstrates how these seemingly contradictory frames of recognition gradually conjoined within 20th-century Polish sex work governance strategies, rendering sex workers unimaginable subjects of rights and social justice claimants. (shrink)

A contribution to the sixth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” this article reflects on the challenges that understanding the Holocaust posed for Jews in Palestine and has posed for them in Israel. Ofer concentrates on the images of victims, fighters, and survivors as they were formulated during the last years of World War II and after the establishment of the State of Israel. Behind these images stood historical, concrete human beings who were classified according to (...) concepts supplied by Zionist and historical Jewish culture, in which activism vs. quietism had long presented major issues for debate. A narrative and typology developed of fighting heroes, victims, and survivors; Ofer questions how different these categories were from each other. In pursuit of an answer, she examines institutions in Israel for commemoration and remembrance, especially Yad Vashem, a state-established institution centering on its often-reconfigured and redesigned historical museums. Finally, this article explores the impact of immigrations and wars on the approach of Israelis to activism and quietism, with special reference to attitudes toward the Holocaust. (shrink)

The shift from a welfarist to a retributivist perspective on crime, which is one of the themes of David Garland?s book, has brought with it a renewed emphasis on the victims of crime and their rights. This shift in emphasis, I suggest, raises questions about the way we think of the relationship between individual citizens and between citizens and the state. Different political theories will produce different accounts of this relationship and hence different ways of characterising the status and (...) role of victims in the criminal process. In this paper then I sketch a roughly communitarian view of the citizen relationship as a context for an account of the status of victims. Thus, I argue, we need to consider not just the expectations that victims rightly have that they have rights which should to be recognised in the criminal process but also their duties as participants. Duties which require them to bear witness in calling offenders to account. This gives victims an active role in the criminal process but one that may come at a price since it might require victims to be subjected to greater scrutiny in the process of a criminal trial than they might find bearable. (shrink)

Who is a victim? Considerations of innocence typically figure in our notions of victimhood, as do judgments about causation, responsibility, and harm. Those identified as victims are sometimes silenced or blamed for their misfortune—responses that are typically mistaken and often damaging. However, other problems arise when we defer too much to victims, being reluctant to criticize their judgments or testimony. Reaching a sensitive and yet critical stand on victims’ credibility is a difficult matter. In this book, Trudy (...) Govier carefully examines the concept of victimhood and considers the practical implications of the various attitudes with which we may respond to victims. These issues are explored with reference to a range of complex examples, including child victims of institutional abuse and the famed Rigoberta Menchú controversy. Further topics include the authority of personal experience, restorative justice, restitution, forgiveness, and closure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Victims in VogueElizabeth Bailie (bio)Donning white robes of slender flesh,They saunter the catwalk,Like a Treblinka corridorBrazen in their stolen innocence.Modeling Giacommetti's latest line,These coquettes of contagionKneel self-scourgedBefore their own shrines.Public penitents,Slim tokens of transfiguration,They withdraw, unforgiven,In ceremonial hunger.Elizabeth Bailie Elizabeth Bailie is a poet, writer, and lay contemplative who lives in the hills of central Massachusetts just up the road from St. Joseph's Trappist Monastery, her spiritual home.Copyright (...) © 2006 Michigan State University Press... (shrink)

This work proposes research on a still unexplored psychical world: thoughts, emotions, and real events experienced by racket victims of the three largest criminal organizations of the South of Italy: Mafia, Camorra, and ‘Ndrangheta. The purpose is to understand the multifaceted psycho-anthropological and social issues criminal organizations have settled on, and particularly which psycho-relational dynamics and sociocultural codes come into play in the complex and controversial relationship between victim and criminal system, between victim and support systems. With entrepreneurs and (...) tradesmen victims of organized crime, we have analyzed lived experiences—in particular fear—and psychological problems they had to cope with; events and motivations that allowed them “breaking” the silence and asking for help; the representation of a support network before and after their possible pressing charges; the kind of help offered by support systems. Dignity and self-respect, the fight for one's own freedom and honor,.. (shrink)

David Boonin has recently argued that although no existing theory of legal punishment provides adequate moral justification for the practice of punishing criminal wrongdoing, compulsory victim restitution (CVR) is a morally justified response to such wrongdoing. Here I argue that Boonin’s thesis is false because CVR is a form of punishment. I first support this claim with an argument that Boonin’s denial that CVR is a form of punishment requires a groundless distinction between a state’s response to a criminal offense (...) and its response to an offender’s failure to comply with the sanctions imposed for that offense. I then suggest that this argument points to a definition of punishment that not only meets Boonin’s own desiderata for a definition of punishment but also implies that CVR is a form of punishment. Finally, I argue that CVR is a form of punishment even under Boonin’s own proposed definition of punishment. -/- . (shrink)

In two recent works, Intellectuals and Power and General Theory of Victims, François Laruelle offers a critique of the public intellectual, including Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming such intellectuals have a disregard for victims of crimes against humanity. Laruelle insists that the victim has been left out of philosophy and displaced by an abstract pursuit of justice. He offers a non- philosophical approach that reverses the victim/intellectual dyad and calls for compassionate insurrection. In this paper, we probe Laruelle's critique of (...) the committed intellectual's obligations to victims, specifically, through an examination of Sartre's "A Plea for Intellectuals." We hope to show the value of Laruelle's theory on victims, crime and power for imagining future-oriented intellectuals. (shrink)

Victims of disaster suffer, not only at the very moment of the disaster, but also years after the disaster has taken place, they are still in an emotional journey. While many moral perspectives focus on the moment of the disaster itself, a lot of work is to be done years after the disaster. How do people go through their suffering and how can we take care of them? Research on human suffering after a major catastrophe, using an ethics of (...) care perspective, is scarce. People suffering from disasters are often called to be in distress and their emotional difficulties ‘medicalised’. This brings them often into a situation of long term use of medication, and one can wonder if medication is of help to them in the long run. In our paper, we will explore another moral perspective, focusing on the importance of the victims’ narrative and their lived experiences. We will use Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reflections from ‘Suffering is not the same as pain’ for conceptualizing human suffering and how to apply it to victims of disaster. Ricoeur suggests that suffering is not a quantity that can be measured, but a characteristic that should be studied qualitatively in interpersonal and narrative contexts. Above all, the perspective of care and listening could offer an opportunity to reconcile people from their loss and suffering. (shrink)

ObjectivePeer victimization is a substantial early life stressor linked to psychiatric symptoms and poor academic performance. However, the sex-specific cognitive or behavioral outcomes of bullying have not been well-described in preadolescent children.MethodsUsing the baseline dataset of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study 2.0.1 data repository, we evaluated associations between parent-reported bullying victimization, suicidality, and non-suicidal self-injury, as well as internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems, cognition, and academic performance.ResultsOf the 11,015 9-10-year-old children included in the analyses, 15.3% experienced bullying victimization, as (...) reported by the primary caregiver. Of these, boys were more likely to be bullied than girls. Children who were bullied were more likely to display NSSI or passive suicidality and active suicidality. Bullied children also had lower cognitive scores, greater behavioral problems, and poorer grades. Across all participants, boys had poorer grades and greater behavioral problems than girls; however, bullied boys had greater behavioral problems than girls in several areas. Compared to their non-bullied peers, bullied children with greater non-suicidal self-injury or suicidality also had greater behavioral problems and poorer grades.ConclusionThese findings highlight the sex-specific effects of bullying, and the negative associations of bullying victimization with cognitive performance, behavioral problems, and academic performance. Future longitudinal studies will identify the natural history and neural correlates of these deficits during adolescence. (shrink)

By considering various case studies drawn from contemporary culture, I propose the idea of victim-blaming shaming, which, like victim blaming, involves replicating injustice by focusing attention on the particular situation rather than the general problem. In cases of victim-blaming shaming, a person is criticized for in any way addressing a problem by addressing the victim. Victim-blaming not only involves an inconsistent ethic, but because of this inconsistency promotes that which it opposes. It responds to a social problem by directing attention (...) to an individual within that problematic social situation. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the question of whether crime victims can be said to have a moral right to see their victimizers punished that could explain why they often feel wronged or cheated when the state fails to punish offenders. In the first part, I explain what I mean by a “right to punishment” and what it is for such a right to “explain” the frustrated crime victim’s reaction. In the second part, I distinguish such a right from (...) a Lockean-style right to punish, which is also shown incapable of providing the needed explanation. In the third part I argue that it is difficult to identify any benefit such that the right to punishment could plausibly be understood as a right to that benefit. I discuss two main candidates here: the vaguely Hegelian idea that punishment is itself some sort of restitution for the wrong done to the victim; and the idea, due to Victor Tadros, that punishment is a form of compensation for wrongdoing by contributing indirectly to protecting victims from future harm. In the final section, I suggest instead that the frustrated crime victim’s reaction, when justified, is best explained, not by the violation of any right to punishment, but rather by the state’s failure to treat the victim as an equal. (shrink)

This article examines the processes of investigation and gathering evidence about victims of the September 11 attacks to better understand the inability of state and nonstate institutions to effectively deal with the invisibility of undocumented migrants in terms of providing assistance and recognition at a moment of tragedy. The failure to make the invisible visible or to address the very question of visibility publicly is explained by three major reasons: 1) A general fear of coming forward on the part (...) of undocumented migrants or their families, partly as a result of their legal status and their lack of trust in government agencies, which was compounded by ineffective communication about available relief services; 2) different procedural requirements and logics of evidence used by government and nongovernmental relief agencies, which, in some cases, made it impossible for undocumented migrants or their families to provide proof of their presence at the site or employment in the businesses affected; 3) the context of 9/11 as a disruptive event that influenced the overall climate in which issues of victimhood and immigration status could be addressed. (shrink)

In her book Victims' Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights, Diana Meyers offers a careful analysis of victims' stories as a narrative genre, and she argues that stories in this genre function as a call to care: they both depict a moral void and issue a moral demand, thereby fostering the development of a culture of human rights. This article, while finding Meyers's articulation of this idea compelling, questions Meyers's account of how victims' stories do their (...) moral work. Whereas Meyers argues that victims' stories are complete narratives, characterized by a distinctive form of closure, it suggests that the moral power of victims' stories may lie in part in their open-endedness or lack of closure. In telling their stories, victims engage their audiences in a new moral relationship and implicitly give them a role to play in bringing about the moral closure they seek. (shrink)

In Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat offers a comprehensive critique of the interrelated concepts of "victim" and "survivor" as they have been ideologically distorted in Western thought. Nissim-Sabat proposes that a phenomenological attitude empowers us to overcome the anti-human consequences of both victimization of individuals and peoples and the ideological distortions of concepts that help to perpetuate that victimization.

The most accessible expression of François Laruelles non-philosophical, or non-standard, thought, _General Theory of Victims_ forges a new role for contemporary philosophers and intellectuals by rethinking their relation to victims. A key text in recent continental philosophy, it is indispensable for anyone interested in the debates surrounding materialism, philosophy of religion, and ethics. Transforming Joseph de Maistres adage that the executioner is the cornerstone of society, _General Theory of Victims_ instead proposes the victim as the cornerstone of humanity and (...) the key figure for contemporary thought. Laruelle condemns philosophy for participating in and legitimating the great persecutions of the twentieth century, and lays out a new vision of victim-oriented ethics. To do this, he engages the resources of both quantum physics and theology in order to adapt a key concept of non-philosophy, Man-in-person, for a new understanding of the victim. As Man-in-person, the victim is no longer exclusively defined by suffering, but has the capacity to rise up against the worlds persecution. Based on this, Laruelle develops a new ethical role for the intellectual in which he does not merely represent the victim, but imitates or clones it, thereby assisting the victims uprising within thought. (shrink)

Philosophers have had surprisingly little to say about the concept of a victim although it is presupposed by the extensive philosophical literature on rights. Proceeding in four stages, I seek to remedy this deficiency and to offer an alternative to the two current paradigms that eliminates the Othering of victims. First, I analyze two victim paradigms that emerged in the late 20th century along with the initial iteration of the international human rights regime – the pathetic victim paradigm and (...) the heroic victim paradigm. Holocaust victims are quintessential instances of the pathetic victim paradigm. They are marked by passivity and innocence in the face of overpowering force and unspeakable humanly inflicted suffering. Aung San Suu Kyi is an exemplar of the heroic victim paradigm – prisoners of conscience, in Amnesty International’s terms. Because heroic victims face off against the repressive power of the state to fight injustice, they are by no means passive, but they must be innocent of wrongdoing – that is, they must use nonviolent means of dissent – to qualify as heroic victims. Second, I problematize the asymmetrical conceptions of innocence that underwrite the two victim paradigms. Whereas the pathetic victim paradigm identifies innocence with passivity, the heroic victim paradigm countenances agentic victims and adverts to a universalist, absolutist stance on the limits of the legitimate use of state power to ascribe innocence to heroic victims. Both conceptions of innocence are out of keeping with well established social and legal practices regarding what constitutes coercive force and innocent victimhood. Consequently, there is reason to be skeptical of the two victim paradigms. Third, I identify two kinds of human rights violations and two categories of victims that AI defends despite their failure to fit the two paradigms – women trafficked into sex work and prisoners on death row. In many cases, women forced to do sex work are not innocent girls who are ignorant of the trafficking system and who helplessly fall prey to smugglers. They are desperately poor women who for that reason are willing to take enormous risks to try to relieve their own and often their families’ deprivation and suffering. Although these women act nonviolently for irreproachable reasons, they lack the public political agendas that characterize heroic victims. Unless non-fulfillment of subsistence rights is recognized as a form of overpowering force that inflicts severe, avoidable suffering, these women do not qualify as pathetic victims either. The victim paradigms pose an even greater obstacle to recognizing that the death penalty is a human rights violation and that death row prisoners are victims. Because a jury concluded that these individuals committed heinous, violent crimes, they are excluded by the heroic victim paradigm. Only if death row prisoners can be proven (usually through DNA evidence) not to have committed the crimes for which they were convicted can these individuals qualify as pathetic victims. In the absence of any reason to believe that they are innocent and especially if they are unrepentant, they are widely regarded as brutal victimizers of others who deserve no sympathy for, let along relief from, the suffering they “brought on themselves.” Finally, I confront the Othering of victims that results from the two victim paradigms, which leads many victims to eschew the label, thereby opting out of human right discourse. I propose revisions in the victim paradigms that eliminate the real-world exclusions they sponsor as well as the Othering of victims of human rights abuses. In particular, I endorse greater attention to what people and the institutions they create do to other people, and I favor a presumption that unnecessary and severe humanly inflicted suffering is a human rights violation. Moreover, I reject the innocence criterion embedded in the two paradigms and urge that it be replaced by a burdened agency criterion. These modifications better align the concept of a victim with a realistic understanding of human subjectivity and agency and allow for a more capacious understanding of who is a bearer of human rights and under what conditions right-holders become victims of rights violations. (shrink)

The right of a person, who is a victim of a criminal act, to access justice (court) according to the criminal legal order, is analyzed in this article. The right to appeal to a court is analyzed as a constituent part of the principle of accessibility to legal defence. Pre-eminently, the general constitutional fundamentals of the right towards legal defence are estimated. The provisions of the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of Lithuania, i.e. that the right towards legal defence of (...) the infringed rights is absolute, is analyzed while taking into consideration the attitude formed by the international courts, i.e. that the right to justice is not an absolute and can only be restricted by being ruled by the principle of proportionality and the other legal principles. (shrink)

It’s hardly news that settler culture normalizes ecocide. Those of us raised as settlers who are nevertheless ecoconscious routinely blame ourselves for our failure to live up to our own best expectations when it comes to challenging the norms and practices of our culture. This leads us to overlook that we’re also—and, I think, much more so—among its victims. I outline five manifestations of victimhood routinely exhibited by the ecoconscious settler activists, scholars, and students with whom I interact. I (...) then consider how we can transition from being victims to survivors of our culture, which is vital for ending ecocide. These two concepts, victimhood and survivorship, are regularly juxtaposed when discussing recovery for those subject to abuse, violence, and other trauma-inducing phenomena. Together they provide the basis for a clearer understanding of how we ecoconscious settlers should engage in the ongoing fight for our lives and our futures. (shrink)

This article examines the St. James Infirmary, a nonprofit occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers in San Francisco, to consider how particular organizational spaces and practices may challenge gender ideologies in the United States—in this case, of women sex workers as “victim-criminals.” Drawing empirically from multimethod qualitative research and theoretically from feminist institutionalism, I indicate how the SJI’s broader institutional context has produced a victim-criminal ideology of women in prostitution. Next, I consider the SJI’s organizational emergence and operations (...) to argue that, by deploying particular spatial-discursive practices and operational procedures, nonprofits with legacies of activism may draw from these to challenge dominant gender ideologies, even as they work alongside the broader institutional structures that promote them. Although single case studies like the SJI cannot establish broad theoretical generalizations and propositions, I use it to build knowledge and highlight important lessons about nonprofits, gender, and institutional change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Suffering, Victims, and Poetic Inspiration Raymund Schwager University ofInnsbruck Poetic inspiration has something to do with the divine. The Greek tragedies are classic examples of that. The poets regarded themselves as inspired by the divine Muses, and in their works the gods are quite naturally present in the lives of human beings. Sometimes the gods treat them in a friendly way, sometimes they spur on conflicts or even (...) inspire human beings to take revenge upon one another. At the end of some tragedies the gods appear as a deus ex machina who brings everything to resolution, or at least pretends to do so. Nevertheless, it is not these various gods, but rather human beings themselves, suffering human beings more precisely, who are at the center of this dramatic event inspired by the divine Muses. Human beings suffer because they come into conflict with each other and fall victim to the vengeful and violent acts of others. In the Greek tragedies human beings do not act in a calm and sensible way. Rather, they are in bondage to their passions, and through these passions the gods speak to them. While performing a sacrifice of purification and thanksgiving, Heracles flies into a rage inspired by several of the goddesses and slaughters his own children. In a Dionysian frenzy Agaue and her companions tear apart her own son. Orestes, believing himself to be obeying a command of Apollo, kills his mother, who had committed adultery and murdered her own husband. And above all, the great, genocidal war of Troy did not so much originate in the longing of Paris for Helen, as in a dispute between the gods. In every respect human beings seem to be more the victims of the gods than themselves wicked persons who commit evil deeds—and they are above all the ones who suffer the most. Helen, the "cause" of the massive slaughter of the Trojan war, is exclusively depicted by Euripides in the role of one who suffers greatly, indeed even beyond the bounds ofhuman endurance. Even Medea, who goes so far as to kill her own children, is not 64Raymund Schwager depicted by the same poet as a moral monster, but as a woman overwhelmed by boundless grief. The gods thus appear in a somewhat murky light: they are indispensable to the poets' purpose yet at the same time severely criticized. For Euripides they are often much worse than human beings. In his Heracles, he goes so far in his irony as to depict the goddess of vengeance herself criticizing Hera, who makes Heracles suffer in order to quench her thirst for revenge which was caused by the unfaithfulness of her husband Zeus. Euripides considers all these stories of gods to be humanly-contrived fables. Nevertheless, he also believes that there can be no drama without the gods. How could the mysterious depths of human passions be understood without the gods? If the poet had no one to indict except other human beings, his works would quickly become nothing but tepid moral tracts. The gods are indispensable and yet they must be criticized: the poetic inspiration in the Greek tragedies thrives on ambiguity. Suffering humanity is confronted with an incomprehensible fate which only the poet's ambiguous parables and images are able to depict. The great suffering figures in the tragedies of Euripides find their echo in another tradition's suffering figure, whose fate is also depicted in poetic words. A suffering figure who also both listens to and argues with his God: Job. A misfortune has befallen Job, which he simply cannot understand. And while even his alleged friends torment him, he suffers even more from his God. Job feels persecuted by God, tormented and driven to despair. Job would like to argue with God and even take him to court. But he cannot do so. He experiences God as an invisible enemy who is present everywhere. Nevertheless, he turns to this same God in his deepest distress and is confident of finding a savior in him. The God of Job is contradictory: this is a God on whom Job can rely but with whom he must also struggle. However, it is just this contradiction... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Being Fashionable Tryhards and Fashion Victims Effortless Cool Self‐effacing Goals.

In the current research, we examined whether ostracism and sexual objectification affect the tendency to blame the victim of sexual harassment. Previous research concerning victim blame examined the attribution of blame considering the characteristics of the victim, the perpetrator, and the relation between them. However, no research to date examined whether situational factors of the perceiver can affect their perception and judgment of blame. We propose that sexual objectification and ostracism may elicit empathy toward the victim, and in turn, reduce (...) victim blame. In two experimental studies, women were instructed to imagine interacting with a videotaped man who either gazed at their body, away from them, or at their face. Then, they were asked to read a newspaper article or watch a video portraying encounters in which the man's sexual advances continued after the woman expressed discomfort and lack of interest. In study 1, we found that sexually objectified women attributed less blame to the woman compared with the women who were treated well, with ostracized women falling in between and marginally different from both. In study 2, using mediation analysis we found an indirect effect such that sexually objectified women experienced greater empathy toward the victim, which was associated with reduced attribution of blame. It appears that greater similarity between the situation of the perceiver and the situation of the victim elicits greater empathy. This adds to the previous knowledge that personality similarities result in higher empathy. (shrink)

of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) forthcoming in Social Neuroscience. [nearly final draft in .pdf] An empirical investigation of moral judgment in autism.

In 2010, Connecticut implemented an offence prohibiting minors from engaging in sexting. This legislation was part of a range of reforms across the United States aiming to better tailor the criminal law’s response to youth sexting by distinguishing sexting from child abuse material. Drawing from submissions to the Connecticut General Assembly’s Sexting Bill, media reports and recent ‘sexting’ cases, this article adopts a feminist perspective and examines the justifications for and implications of this sexting statute. It argues that while aiming (...) to create a distinction between child abuse material and sexting through a ‘lesser’ offence, these paternalistic reforms are informed by some of the same logics shaping child pornography/child abuse material law. Therefore, this statute is situated on a continuum of paternalistic legislation which utilises the constitutive expressive function of the criminal law to register anxieties about young people’s sexual and technological practices. As a result, this statute conflates victims and perpetrators of image based sexual abuses and fails to meet its deterrent and protective aims. (shrink)

This paper discusses what kinds of conflicts arise when a crime has been committed, and with whom—and in which of their possible roles—the offender should be seen as having such conflicts. The possible roles of the victim are in focus, as is the constitutive role of the act of criminalizing a certain kind of behavior. It is argued that while in the tort conflict the victim should be seen as a party qua him- or herself in a ‘fuller’ sense (and (...) with full freedom on how to handle the conflict, including dropping it), in the criminal law conflict it is community, the ‘we’, that should be looked upon as the party to the conflict with the offender. The victim should not be seen as excluded from the criminal law conflict, though: to the contrary, he or she is a member of community and has an important role to play. This role, however, needs to be strictly defined in a way that gives the victim the function of a certain kind of representative for ‘us’, the community. This role should not allow the victim much room to influence how the criminal law conflict is handled. The model I am suggesting presupposes—I think, at least—that criminal law conflict and tort conflict should be handled together at the same trial. (shrink)

This article contributes to recent existentialist interventions in critical criminology (see Lippens and Crewe 2009) and offers the existential concept of ‘event’ as a guiding image for critical victimology. Whereas existential criminologists have examined crime and wrongdoing, very little attention has been given to victimization. I utilize the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Claude Romano to offer a critique of existing approaches to victimization within mainstream criminology and develop an evential analytic to understand the event of victimization. This paper (...) brings together existential philosophy and victimology to offer an alternative approach to victimization. I engage with the ‘problem of number’ in conventional victimology and offer a critique of quantitative approaches to victimization based on the unsubstitutability and singularity of existence. Through a discussion of selfhood and embodiment from an evential standpoint, this paper moves beyond existing victimological approaches to identity. I also consider the relationship between victimization and trauma. In the final section of the paper I carve out an alternative research agenda through a discussion of bearing witness and events of victimization. (shrink)

This paper points out neglected considerations about the standing to blame. It starts from the observation that the standing to blame debate largely focusses on factors concerning the blamer or the relation of blamer and wrongdoer, mainly hypocrisy and meddling, while neglecting the victim of wrongdoing. This paper wants to set this right by pointing out how considerations about the victim can impact a third party’s standing. The first such consideration is the blamer’s personal relation to the victim. It is (...) argued that persons close to the victim thereby gain standing even in the presence of factors that would normally undermine it. Arguing from the well-known sexual assault case of Chanel Miller and the public reactions to it, the paper then introduces two more considerations about standing hitherto neglected. First, given that blame has an expressive function and serves to contradict expressive aspects of wrongdoings, it is argued that third-party blame can morally support the victim in the face of wrongdoing and that such support matters to victims. It is argued that this importance of third-party blame can ground standing. Thirdly and relatedly, the paper argues that insufficient collective responses to wrongdoing, i.e. when other bystanders do not respond with sufficient blaming responses, can equally ground standing of third parties. It is argued that these considerations are relevant not only for an ethics of blame broadly conceived but also for standing to blame in particular. Thereby, the paper establishes that considerations about the victim are central for discussion of the standing to blame. (shrink)

This book conducts a timely inquiry into contemporary conscience and politics.

'The Patient as Victim and Vector' is jointly written by four authors at the University of Utah with expertise in bioethics health law, and both clinical practice and public health policy concerning infectious disease.

This study assesses the relationships among unethical corporate values, bullying experiences, psychopathy, and selling professionals’ ethical evaluations of bullying. Information was collected from national/regional samples of selling professionals. Results indicated that unethical values, bullying, and psychopathy were positively interrelated. Psychopathy and unethical values were negatively associated with moral intensity, while moral intensity was positively related to ethical issue importance. Psychopathy and unethical values were negatively related to issue importance, and issue importance and moral intensity were positively related to ethical judgment. (...) Finally, ethical judgment and moral intensity were positively linked to ethical intention; psychopathy was negatively associated with ethical intention. (shrink)

The key focus in ethics should be on victims. Victims are those that suffer from unnecessary and preventable pain and misery. Non-human animals can also suffer and should therefore be included in the moral circle. Ethical living is striving to avoid harm to others and striving to help alleviate or prevent suffering. Being good isn't easy.Export citation.

Diana Meyers argues that breaking the silence of victims and attending to their stories are necessary steps towards realizing human rights. Yet using highly personal victims' stories to promote human rights raises significant moral concerns, hence Meyers suggests that before victims' stories can be accessed and used, it is morally imperative that requirements of informed consent and non-retraumatization are secured. This article argues that while Meyers' proviso is important, and necessary, it may not be sufficient. First, one (...) potential problem with seeking to secure “informed consent” is that one has to ask for the consent, and in the act of asking one is potentially retraumatizing the victim. Secondly, the assumption that victims have ownership right over their stories, which is a key premise in Meyers's argument, is much more problematic than may appear. (shrink)

This study investigates the role of parental and peer relationships’ quality on homophobic victimization and possible consequences on mental health during adolescence. Participants were 394 adolescents, (41.6% male and 58.4 % female) aged 15-20 years (M = 16.55; SD =.85), attending the third and fourth classes of public high schools in Italy. Participants completed the Homophobic Bullying Scale to evaluate homophobic victimization toward gays and lesbians or assumed homosexuals, the Symptom Check-list-90 to evaluate mental health, and the Inventory of Parent (...) and Peer Attachment to investigate quality of peer and parental relationships (in term of communication, disaffection and trust). Results show how quality of peer relationships is not connected with victimization, as well as quality of parental relationships is linked with homophobic victimization, that is also connected with anxiety and somatization problems. Theoretical and educational implications were discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss the role that victim groups and organizations may have in framing and supporting an accountability agenda, as well as their potential for endorsing a distributive justice agenda. The article explores two empirical cases where victims' rights have been introduced and applied by victim organizations to promote accountability—Colombia and Peru. It will be argued that if transitional justice in general and victim reparations in particular are to embark in a quest for distributive (...) justice, it cannot do so without considering victims as political actors, and putting forward demands in terms of victims’ rights. (shrink)

Sexual assault leaves the victims with unbearable emotional pain from the experience. The unwanted aggression against their freewill causes them to suffer physically and mentally. On top of that, they also have to fight to be treated fairly and respectfully during their court trials. There has been some controversy regarding rape prosecution in the Islamic legal system. The reason for this controversy is that the rape victim would usually be either charged with zina because of her confession, or committing (...) qadhf, as a result of her failure to provide four male eyewitnesses. This paper aims at investigating the fundamental legal rights of rape victims who complain of being raped, to be defended fairly, and to get exemption from punishment as provided in Islamic law. This paper also seeks to investigate the admissibility of the individual testimony of the victim against the rapist. This paper suggests that proving rape is not similar to proving zina, because a rape victim who lodges a report or complains of her ordeal of being raped should not be treated the same as a person who confesses to zina. Proving rape is also different from accusing the rapist with committing zina. This study will explore opinions and arguments of classical Muslim scholars of Islamic jurisprudence from various schools of thought. (shrink)

Sexual exploitation of children is a worldwide problem and Bangladesh is not immune from it. Children are being exploited sexually in various ways in Bangladesh and this trend is alarmingly increasing. The study is an attempt to analyze the nature and types of child exploitation as a victim in different contexts, such as housemaid, paedophilianism, child marriage and so on. It also tries to reveal the causes and consequences of the sexual exploitation of the child in Bangladesh. The data and (...) information for the study have been collected from field investigation and personal observation. The paper ends with some recommendations to redress the problem. (shrink)