TBD
Sensitivity and Compassion while Attempting Empowerment
There are two meanings for the term “victim”:
- A term intended to describe neutrally that one person’s wellbeing was significantly reduced due to the action (usually intentional) of other people.
- E.g. the victim of a murder or a rape
- A state of mind which
- focuses mostly on the harm that was done to oneself
- sees oneself as helpless to defend oneself from such harm or to gain “justice” by some form of reparations from or punishment to the perpetrator.
Of course, when talking to a victim (in the first meaning of “victim”), it’s not advisable to say to such a person that they are not in fact a victim (in the second meaning of “victim”). Even if saying so stems from good intentions, namely to empower the person to see themselves not as a victim in the second sense, the problem lies in the ambiguity of the word “victim” (an ambiguity between the two meanings mentioned above). So such a statement usually causes a misunderstanding and the person perceives it as gaslighting or discounting their real emotional suffering that stems from the perpetrator’s act.
It is a general principle to speak clearly and hence try to avoid ambiguous language that can be misinterpreted and lead to friction instead of understanding and harmony. Therefore, instead of “victim”, I prefer to use neutral language in the format “descriptor + reference”, where the descriptor term can be any of: “affected”, “injured”, “impacted”, “targeted”, while the reference term can be: “person”, “individual”, “party”. Thus we can use terms such as:
- Injured person
- Affected individual
- Impacted individual
- Targeted party