Reconceptualizing Critical Victimology by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Victimhood, Innocence, and Blame

There are innocent victims and there are terrorists and I find it offensive that anyone would seek to equate the two. People make choices to become involved in paramilitary groups and if they were killed, that was the choice they made. They didn’t give their victims any such choice.[9]

The final issue we wish to address is the space available is the relationship between victimhood, innocence, and blame. We have argued previously that, like the construction of the crime victim in established democracies, a phenomenon is apparent in many of the transitional justice societies that we have studied wherein it is only those designated as “innocent” who may lay claim to the term victim (McEvoy and McConnachie 2012). Summarizing for current purposes, a hierarchy of victims is often apparent, where those who consider themselves or are considered by others to be “innocent” victims dispute the “deservingness” of other “bad” or “impure” victims (Madlingozi 2007; Meyers 2011) to recognition. Of course such victim hierarchies often map closely onto the national political sphere. As noted above, there are often close relationships between political constituencies and victims’ groups, which may in turn be linked to disputed interpretations of the violence of the past and its justifiability.[10]

As we and others have argued, transitional justice appears to find it difficult to contend with victims who are not in fact entirely blameless (Bouris 2007; Moon 2008). Of course, in the lived experience of conflicted societies, not every victim will fit neatly into such boxes and, as argued above with regard to crime victims, individuals may move between these categories. By way of illustration, one of the authors has conducted interviews with hundreds of ex-combatants and, almost universally, they speak of experiences of victimhood in the form of violence visited against them, their families, or communities by other organizations, the state, or indeed the armed groups to which they belonged (Shirlow and McEvoy 2008). The two categories of perpetrators who are most readily recognized as victims in the transitional justice literature—child soldiers and female members of armed groups—are again defined by the lack of voice or agency in their involvement in violence (Moser and McElwaine 2001; Drumbl 2012). Their claim to “innocence” and their lack of agency is precisely what renders them eligible to the title of victim. For the rest of those directly involved in violence, they are usually deemed blameworthy. As the spokesperson for one reconciliation group in South Africa suggested:

I think that’s the huge mistake that victims make, is that they don’t ask themselves you know, a lot of deeper questions on, what would make somebody join a group of militants and to commit certain acts? What has shaped them to believe in what they do? . . . when people begin to reflect upon that they will be able to understand that as much as the victims have suffered but so too have people involved in the struggle gone through challenges and difficult things. They haven’t just thought, OK, let’s go and attack that particular group of people, you know.

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