Читать книгу Approaching Victimology as social science for Human rights a Spanish perspective онлайн

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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.

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