victim, complex

why i don't identify as a "survivor"

content warning: sexual assault, victim-blaming

disclaimer: i'm not an expert on anything. i am 19 and a university dropout and will probably change my mind about all of this at some point.

One thing about being a victim of sexual violence is that you're not supposed to call yourself that. Our culture has a strange relationship with the label of "victim" where in some contexts it is desirable to be seen as a victim, but one must never be caught seeing oneself as a victim. In public discourse about sexual violence, you're supposed to use the palatable, politically correct term "survivor".

Okay, that was harsh. For those who identify with the term, I'm told that being a survivor instead of a victim is liberating. It means you lived and you're not defined by your trauma or something, which is an important thing to assert in a world where trauma is more commodified than ever before. And as much as I support people who define their experiences in this way, as I basically assume people are experts in their own lives,

I can't help but feel like we're all being scammed.

Identifying as a "survivor" rather than a "victim" can be empowering in all the wrong ways. There is a thin line between refusing to identify with your own suffering and dissociating from your suffering. For me, calling myself a "survivor" certainly seemed like the former. It was, and is, the most commonly used word by activists. I saw "survivor" from the mouths of intersectional feminists discussing consent education, sex work decriminalisation and transformative justice. You know, real ways to make the world safer.

On the contrary, "victim" was the stuff of tabloid clickbait, spat from the foaming mouths of a thousand conservative politicians whose main priority was not the wellbeing of people who had been raped, but making sure they couldn't get an abortion if they wanted or needed it. "Victim" was something one was called as an insult—"Don't be such a victim!" No wonder people have such conflicting feelings about what is, and I hope this isn't controversial, a completely neutral descriptor.

This is what I find so appealing about the dreaded V-word: it doesn't actually convey any information about the person it describes. Survivors are, like, strong and badass in that way that inspires everyone around them. Despite the tabloids, victims aren't actually anything in and of themselves. The more I narcissistically ponder What I Am Now That This Has Happened, the more apparent it becomes that the way out is to accept that it's not actually about me. I didn't do the rape, so… take it up with the other guy.

Which is a very liberating and very fun framework. Just absolving myself—fairly, I'm sure you'll agree—of all responsibility in this situation, including the responsibility of being a poster child for the light at the end of the fucking tunnel. Something happened. A crime, of which I was the victim. And the rest is silence? Do I simply, as the great poet Hannah Gadsby once said, "identify as tired"?

You may have noticed some glaring problems with this framework. Let's examine them in excruciating detail!

Problem 1: Isn't all of this an excuse to identify with your own damage? Sure, you're rebelling against toxic positivity by refusing to reframe the story in a falsely "empowering" way, but that runs the risk of going too hard in the other direction and enjoying your own misery, mistaking romanticisation for acceptance.

Problem 2: Even though "victim" is a neutral descriptor by itself, it has its connotations. The conservative anti-victim talking point is nonsense but it's still a relevant piece of the conversation by virtue of being repeated a lot very loudly, which is almost a substitute for having merit.

Oh no. It looks like these points have substance to them. Can you put emojis in these essays? This surely calls for a sad face—or worse, nuance. Fuck! :(

So, to the first problem, I'll confess to having a visceral angry reaction to accusations of "romanticisation" of bad and dangerous things, for two reasons. The first is that I do actually have a tendency to romanticise my own suffering and I feel called out, and the second is that the discourse around that particular neurosis is all about (rightfully) condemning it as a maladaptive coping mechanism and almost never about understanding why people do it—or even if they're doing it at all—in the first place.

I've known a lot of people who were really into their own pain, and usually the origin of the habit is Living In A Society that shames people for struggling to function optimally as a cog in the capitalist machine. I used the phrase "toxic positivity" earlier, and now it begs to be defined.

Toxic positivity is the idea that positive thinking is the only acceptable kind of thinking, and that focusing on dark, sad parts of one's condition is always a bad thing to do. The archetypal example of this is when children are told that if they just ignore bullies, the problem will go away. Don't be such a victim! Everybody knows that this logic is nonsensical, but everybody also wants to make the bad things go away by any cliché necessary.

The one good point in Lana Del Rey's notorious Question For The Culture, which was largely overshadowed by her unprovoked shade towards mainly Black female artists, was her response to the accusation that her music romanticises abuse: "[I]n reality I'm just a glamorous person singing about the realities of [...] emotionally abusive relationships[.]"

This is a very silly statement, but it's also not wrong. Del Rey has been unfairly criticised for her refusal to moralise on her subject matter, and this backlash comes from the very same well-meaning worry about people enjoying being sad too much.

So what do you do when you're in pain and ignoring it doesn't make it go away? Well, you can trick yourself into thinking that being in pain makes you cool and interesting. And yes, the "victim" label has the capacity to enable this kind of thinking. This doesn't take away the necessity of being able to describe one's own victimhood.

This brings me to the second problem. Victims are unpopular! To call oneself a victim is to draw attention to a wrong that has been done, necessarily upsetting the status quo. This is why the usual suspects treated #MeToo like it was Armageddon even though it didn't really do much. Just naming the problem was too far for the likes of former Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison, who covered up the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House during the 2019 election. (God, I love calling him the former PM. Being Australian is so much less embarrassing now.)

Philosophers and Redditors call this the Just World Fallacy: the idea that good things tend to happen to good people, and vice versa. It's a very soothing bias to have, because you can trick yourself into thinking that if you're a good person, you can avoid victimisation. This is why in rape trials, the prosecution tends to prefer men jurors over women; women are more likely to victim-blame because they are more likely to put themselves in the shoes of the victim and then think about all of the ways they think they'd get out unscathed.

Not to mention that having been victimised can make people more likely to victim-blame, which sounds counterintuitive but doesn't it actually make total sense? When the conversation about sexual violence revolves on the idea of believing victims (because the bar is in fucking Tasmania) there is a social benefit to being seen as a "real" victim. You can mitigate some of the social costs of being a victim by positioning yourself as more trustworthy than other victims. So much of victim-blaming rhetoric comes with a refrain to the tune of "I would know she's lying, because I was really assaulted!"

Hang on, this deserves its own paragraph for emphasis:

My friend, we don't know shit.

As victims we are experts in our own experience, not experts in sexual violence—except, of course, for those of us who are (not me, as per the disclaimer above). We have a tendency to generalise; there's some of that in this very essay, even this sentence itself. We're prone to judging other victims' accounts of their abuse by how closely it resembles our own, but there is no universal trauma response.

This is also a form of self-validation. It's not your fault that you struggle with X trauma response or Y symptom, but it can feel that way if someone else doesn't appear to. What, are they better at recovery than you? Stronger? More worthy of respect? And that deeply flawed premise can turn into either internalised shame or externalised shame. Either it's true and you're a weak, pitiful person, or it's not true and your suffering is the most real and the most valid and the other person is a valor-stealing scumbag, how very dare they.

The fundamental problem with drawing a line between "real" and "fake" claims to victimhood based on vibes alone, besides it being a cruel and illogical thing to do, is that eventually you will find yourself on the wrong side of that line. Eventually the criteria for true victimhood will become so thin that no living person could ever fit them. Real rape victims do not make jokes about their experience and they don't have conflicting feelings about the situation and they don't talk about it unless it is to the relevant police department and they don't have any hesitation about speaking to the relevant police department and they don't behave sexually and they don't look too happy and they don’t get too drunk and they don’t get too political, on and on until you notice that there are not many things left for real victims to do except lie in the grass and weep or die. Which is why it's so imperative for me personally to say that I am a victim and I do what I want, including changing my mind about all of this because consistent narratives are for suckers.

Maybe one day the whole strong badass survivor thing will be my vibe. Sounds fun! Sounds way better than any psychological state that could produce this essay! Until then, though, I am not in the business of pretending, because that would be effort and I am lazy. I hope that future version of myself, if he does exist, looks at the current me with the empathy and understanding I try to give to my younger selves' flawed outlooks on life. If not, what's the point?