Why the hostility toward victims?

Yesterday I posted an item on Alyson M. Cole's The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror.

Coincidentally, yesterday the San Francisco Chronicle also ran an op-ed by Alyson titled "Why the hostility toward victims?" It opens:

IN HIS election-night tribute to the defeated senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, Republican pundit William Bennett waxed eloquent about the senator's concern for victims -- of AIDS, autism, partial-birth abortion, and those in Darfur.

"The poor, the dispossessed, the helpless, the unborn, whether it be here in the United States or abroad," he proclaimed, "have lost a champion in losing Rick Santorum."

This assemblage of the weak and vulnerable is rather remarkable in and of itself, but the real irony is that William Bennett delivered this encomium. For more than a decade, Bennett has been at the forefront of the campaign against the "victims' revolution." He even blamed "the victimology mongers" for rendering the United States susceptible to evil-doers on 9/11. Indeed, Bennett, among others, is responsible for the doublespeak that warped how Americans have come to think about suffering and sufferers.

Without precedent or much public notice, "victim" has become a term of derision, deployed to dismiss, ridicule and condemn. This sentiment congealed in the early 1990s, when politicians and analysts -- like Bennett -- instigated an alarmist crusade alerting Americans that an excess of grievances imperiled the nation. Anti-victimists cast those who allege to be victims as shamefully passive or as cynically manipulative. As a result, seeking recognition of one's injury indicates a deficient character, or even symptoms of a pathology (the dreaded "victim mentality"). Individuals now must use other designations to avoid stigma. The brutalized Central Park jogger accordingly emerged from seclusion to insist that she is not a "victim" but a "survivor." Similarly, those who died on Sept. 11, 2001 are not "victims" in our collective vocabulary as much as "heroes," posthumously conscripted as soldiers in the "war for freedom."

Click here to read the rest of Alyson Cole's essay.

Click here to read how The Cult of True Victimhood fared at the "page 69 test."

--Marshal Zeringue