Victimization

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Victimization is a technical term especially in criminology . The verb victimize means “to make a victim” ( Latin victima 'victim' ) by harming someone through criminal activity. In social science in particular, the term also describes the process of ascribing a victim status or role to someone or a group of people, as well as corresponding self-ascriptions.

Since the 1990s there has been a debate in the media about the political and social implications of harm and the use of the term victim .

In different areas

criminology

In criminology, victimology deals scientifically with people who have undoubtedly been harmed as victims of crime. The term victimization here refers to the process of harm done by offenders and describes the relationship between victim and offender.

Jurisprudence

A prerequisite for benefits under the Federal German Victims Compensation Act is “victimization”, namely the determination that an applicant is a “victim” within the meaning of the law.

Victimization is also referred to by lawyers as the unjustified disadvantage of people who have filed a lawsuit against their unequal treatment, provided that the alleged harm is recognized as " discrimination ". The four anti-discrimination directives of the EU prohibit this form of victimization ( Anti-Racism Directive 2000/43 / EC , Framework Directive 2000/78 / EC , Gender Directive (2002) Directive 2002/73 / EC , Gender Directive (2004) Directive 2004/113 / EG ). The introduction to the Equal Treatment Framework Directive states :

"(30) The effective application of the principle of equality requires adequate protection against victimization."

In Section 16 of the German General Equal Treatment Act (AGG, also known as the “Anti-Discrimination Act”), the prohibition of victimization is less ambiguously referred to as the “prohibition of disciplinary measures”.

In order to counter the risks of secondary victimization when questioned as a witness in criminal proceedings, the Victims Assistance Act has existed in Switzerland since 1993 and the Witness Protection Act in Germany since 1998 .

Social sciences

Extended concept of victimization

The term victimization is used differently in the social sciences , both transitive (someone makes someone else a victim or describes someone else as a victim) and reflexive (someone thinks they are a victim or professes to be a victim). Stigma can trigger a victim role, a victim status or a victim myth .

People can also be harmed by unavoidable fateful events (e.g. a natural disaster ). Johan Galtung and his supporters also include people who have been harmed by age discrimination , classicism , elitism , ethnocentrism , nationalism , speciesism , racism , sexism , war etc., that is, by “ structural violence ”, under the term victim.

Attributions

The attribution of a victim role to individual members or groups of society is sometimes carried out by members of dominant social groups, institutions or ideologies .

The effect of the learned helplessness plays a role in the perpetuation of the role of victims . By attribution from outside or through the acquisition of appropriate labeling the self-image can easily from people who damaged one or more times were ( procedure liability ), are people who are permanently damaged are ( state liabilities ) that are so are permanently victimized, a permanent victim status have acquired or cultivate a victim myth .

philosophy

In love your symptom like yourself! describes Slavoj Zizek the process of victimization as a social identity feature of postmodernism . The postmodern subject tends to have a narcissistic self-relationship in which he emphasizes his damagedness and likes to portray himself in a self-chosen victim role.

psychology

In psychology , secondary victimization is the phenomenon that z. B. victims of natural disasters, crime victims (see victim blaming ) or illegal drug addicts are held unjustifiably responsible for their own situation.

Ideology and language criticism

Objections are raised against the designation of injured people as "victims" (reprehensible behavior of people) as well as against the classification of people as injured parties without having suffered a specifically identifiable or generally as such injustice from an identifiable "perpetrator". The core term “victim of a crime” is expanded in such a way that there is no longer any discernible difference to “victims of a natural disaster” or “victims of society”.

First, the inflationary use of the term “victim” is criticized. This could arouse the suspicion that it is more about using an emotionally charged term in the public eye (also in competition or even opposition to other groups of victims) for the suffering of certain victims and to justify a claim to compensation for them, than to help the injured party appropriately.

Second, it is criticized that many injured parties are deprived of the victim status they are entitled to. Because when the term “ victim ” is used, there is often an expectation that people have to be “pure” and “completely innocent” in order to deserve the sympathy of society.

Thirdly, there is criticism of the increasing fashion of constructing victim collectives and assigning oneself to one of these collectives without the speaker being able to convincingly explain which reprehensible or even criminal act is said to have been committed against him. In particular, permissible expressions of opinion are constitutionally considered to be exercising the human right to freedom of expression and should therefore not actually be assessed as (criminal) acts, even if people with a different opinion feel attacked (“victimized”) by them. Nobody has a right not to be contradicted, even with arguments that they do not like, that may even offend them.

The term is used pejoratively , i.e. with a critical intention, by z. B. Researchers such as Pierre Bourdieu are assumed to classify every social phenomenon in the victim-perpetrator grid and take a one-sided position in favor of the injured party.

Instrumentalization of the “victim” concept by perpetrators and politicians

Slavoj Žižek warns against seeing an ethnic conflict there. Instead, in his opinion, the actual power-political connections should be perceived. Only the external interpretation that it is about a racist context helps to turn the conflict into an “ethnic thing”. The reason for this perception is also the victimization, which here as a kind of help only takes on the victims if the helpers consider them to be victims. As soon as the victim status can no longer be established, there will be no support. Support for those affected is only given because the supporters need those affected in their role as victims. The perception of the conflict on a racist foil is therefore conducive to the victimization process.

The cultural sociologist Jonas Pfau describes the way many Germans deal with the past in a similar way: “The perpetrators made themselves victims. Part of this victimization was the jointly developed and individually implemented defense against guilt with regard to the reality of National Socialist extermination. The strategies for this ranged from ignoring and denying to the universalization of the Shoah . "

The book “The Holocaust Industry. How the suffering of the Jews is exploited "by the author Norman G. Finkelstein led to reactions in the German media that were comparable to the 1998 Walser debate . The debate showed that the victimization of Jews, as well as the criticism of victimization , can be combined with memory defenses and anti-Semitic ideas:

"He confers academic consecration to the thesis popular among anti-Semites, according to which Jewish elites are suspected of doing business and pro-Israeli politics with the memory of the extermination of European Jews."

- Martin Dietzsch , Alfred Schobert

Problematic categorization of people

Resistance to external attribution of victim status

Many racialized people experience an additional form of oppression through being ascribed a victim role. Against this, z. B. Organizations such as the theory and practice of a migrant self-organization in their anti- Eurocentric manifesto anthropophagy as an answer to Eurocentric cultural hegemony: "We oppose any attribution practice, be it in the form of victimization or exoticization ".

With the insult: “You victim!” Many aggressions begin, through which the insulted are first made victims in the sense of criminology, provided they are actually as weak as the aggressor assumes. Those who are strong enough have the chance to prove that they are not a “victim” (i.e. the loser of the provoked argument).

"Self-victimization"

Anselm Neft claims that many people in Germany enjoy seeing themselves as “victims”. “Men see themselves as victims of anti-sexism , East Germans as victims of reunification, the chairman of a party regards the entire country as victims of its own past.” “ Postmodern leftists” had started with the method, “[in] the name of one increasingly moral charged identity politics [...] different groups of victims with whom they identify in the tone of personal concern. ”People from the more right-wing spectrum, on the other hand, like to portray themselves as victims of precisely these minorities or as victims of those“ left ”who defend these minorities.

Neft considers the method of dividing the world into "we-groups", which consist of nothing but "victims", and "you groups", whose members are "perpetrators", questionable.

literature

  • Slavoj Žižek: Love your symptom like yourself! Jacques Lacan's Psychoanalysis and the Media . Institute for New Media at the Städelschule. Frankfurt / M. 1991.
  • Pascal Bruckner : I suffer, therefore I am. The disease of modernity . Structure, Berlin 1997.
  • Jonas Pfau: The victimization of the Germans . In: Phase 2 . 10/2003.
  • Luzenir Caixeta: Anthropophagy as an answer to Eurocentric cultural hegemony Or: How the majority society ›has to‹ swallow feminist migrants . In: Hito Steyerl, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (ed.): Does the subaltern speak German? Migration and Post-Colonial Criticism . Unrast Verlag , Münster 2004, ISBN 3-89771-425-6 .
  • Mona Chollet: Who is embarrassed about justice. About the reactionary talk of supposedly enlightened spirits . In: Le Monde diplomatique . (German edition), Oct. 2007, p. 22f (from the French by Michael Adrian)
  • Dieter Hermann, Dieter Dölling: Crime prevention and value orientations in complex societies. Analyzes of the influence of values, lifestyles and milieus on delinquency, victimization and the fruit of crime . Weisser Ring , Mainz 2001.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c victimization. Kriminologie-Lexikon Online, Ed .: Chair for Criminology, Criminal Policy and Police Science at the Ruhr University Bochum Professor Dr. Thomas Feltes and Institute for Criminology at the University of Tübingen Professor Dr. Hans-Jürgen Kerner, www.krimlex.de . Also: Hans J. Kerner, Thomas Feltes, Frank Hofmann, Helmut Janssen, Dieter Kettelhöhn: Kriminologie-Lexikon (basics of criminalistics). 4th edition, Hüthig Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7832-0989-7 .
  2. ^ Victimology. Kriminologie-Lexikon Online, Ed .: Chair for Criminology, Criminal Policy and Police Science at the Ruhr University Bochum Professor Dr. Thomas Feltes and Institute for Criminology at the University of Tübingen Professor Dr. Hans-Jürgen Kerner, www.krimlex.de . Also: Hans J. Kerner, Thomas Feltes, Frank Hofmann, Helmut Janssen, Dieter Kettelhöhn: Kriminologie-Lexikon (basics of criminalistics). 4th edition, Hüthig Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7832-0989-7 .
  3. ↑ Law on Compensation for Victims of Violent Acts. www.gesetze-im-internet.de , Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection , Mohrenstrasse 37, 10117 Berlin.
  4. ↑ Right to compensation for victims. ( Memento from June 22, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) June 1, 2016, Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs ( BMAS ) , Wilhelmstrasse 49, 10117 Berlin.
  5. ↑ Damage from crime . Kriminologie-Lexikon Online, Ed .: Chair for Criminology, Criminal Policy and Police Science at the Ruhr University Bochum Professor Dr. Thomas Feltes and Institute for Criminology at the University of Tübingen Professor Dr. Hans-Jürgen Kerner, www.krimlex.de . Also: Hans J. Kerner, Thomas Feltes, Frank Hofmann, Helmut Janssen, Dieter Kettelhöhn: Kriminologie-Lexikon (basics of criminalistics). 4th edition, Hüthig Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7832-0989-7 .
  6. ↑ Directive 2000/78 / EG (PDF)
  7. ↑ Iris Borrée, Johannes Friedrich, Barbara Wüsten: The little-known victim compensation law. The benefits and their granting - practical problems and need for amendment. Social Security 2/2014, Weißer Ring - non-profit association for the support of crime victims and for the prevention of criminal offenses e. V.
  8. ^ A b Wolfgang Lebe: Viktimologie - The doctrine of the victim - Development in Germany. Phenomenological development of the concept of victim . In: Berlin Forum for Violence Prevention . No. 12 , 2003, p. 8-19 ( PDF ).
  9. ↑ Martin Schaad: Victims and Losers ( Memento from September 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 126 kB). Einstein Forum , June 9, 2006
  10. ↑ Wildwasser Working Group against Sexual Abuse of Girls eV: "Precious be the victim - helpless and good?" (PDF; 373 kB). Berlin expert group against sexual abuse of girls and boys, June 25, 2007
  11. ↑ Xaver Cranach / Georg von Diez / Sebastian Hammelehle / Ulrike Knöfel / Nils Minkmar / Volker Weidermann / Steffen Winter: The crack. After the Dresden debate between Uwe Tellkamp and Durs Grünbein , intellectuals argue about freedom of speech and the right way to deal with the right . In: Der Spiegel . Edition 12/2018. March 17, 2018, pp. 112–115
  12. ↑ in this sense, for example, Guillaume Erner: La société des victimes . Paris 2006, (i.e. The Society of Victims)
  13. ↑ Martin Dietzsch, Alfred Schobert: A "Jewish David Irving"? Norman G. Finkelstein in the Discourse of the Right - Defense Against Memory and Anti-Zionism. [1]
  14. ↑ Anselm Neft: Sacrificial Culture: The Great Mimimi . Time online . May 27, 2018
  15. ↑ Georg Diez: Tellkamp debate: hit someone on the nose and then shout ouch . Spiegel Online . March 13, 2018