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

66 страница из 99

Emerging vocabularies have been used to better describe the experience of those who have suffered crimes. For example, there have been calls for mental health professionals to start viewing trauma sufferers as survivors with agency, control, and resilience, as opposed to victims of circumstances that they have no role in changing. Although the term ‘survivor’ remediates some of the stigma that is typically attached to victimisation and emphasises a person’s agency, it has been criticised for focussing on individual capacity, whilst the term ‘victim’ reminds us of the structural oppression behind many forms of victimisation.

As one survivor of sexual assault reflects, there is no single term that can encompass the experiences of individuals who have suffered violence, and a single experience should not define a person.

Recommendation

Organisations dealing with victims of hate crimes should actively avoid the unreflective adoption of the victim label in interactions with their clients. Instead, they should be aware of the impact that such labelling can have on both the victims’ self-perception and the staff perceptions about that person’s agency. Some organisations may choose to simply delete the term victim from their vocabulary while others may prefer to be cautious not to impose this or other labels to people who report hate incidents (Victim-centred approaches to tackling hate – Tackling Hate).