Megan’s reflection is something I have heard many people who experience violence say as they float between the terms victim and survivor. It’s almost as if we have been socialized into viewing those terms in a binary. The former is more easily associated with weakness, brokenness, and ongoing grief. The latter connotes strength, fortitude, and an overcomer’s constitution.
Therapy resources, like Good Therapy, position these terms as “stages” of healing, where one goes from identifying as a victim to a survivor to, finally, a thriver. Psychotherapist Susanne Dillmann describes healing as a step-by-step internal process: “[A] person has grown through the victim stage, he or she enters into the survivor stage, which is the time when one begins to feel strong and confident and to truly believe that there are resources and choices.” Much of white Western therapy relies on such linear healing models and thus promotes overly simplistic, linear talking points. In the marketplace of therapy, you are still selling a product that has to be packaged into something digestible, where you can follow a series of steps and then be 100 percent back to normal.
Language has been a stubborn problem, not only within the victim therapy space but also within the criminal punishment system. Sex worker organizers and trans people have long called attention to the dehumanizing language law enforcement has used to describe their communities.
“No Humans Involved” (NHI) is the unofficial term used to describe the murders of Black people, sex workers, trans people, Indigenous people, and many other marginalized people. This language reveals that the punishment system does not see people that belong to these categories as humans. How, then, could they ever regard them as victims? A victim of a crime is afforded “rights” under the law, but marginalized people cannot be granted those rights. Therefore, they do not qualify as victims, no matter what atrocious horrors are committed against them.
A prime example of this callous indifference is New York state’s delay to file charges in the public killing of Jordan Neely earlier this month. Neely, a homeless Black youth who was suffering from the effects of starvation and grief over the murder of his mother, was strangled to death by Daniel Penny on the subway. To the state and to Penny, Neely was a public nuisance, not a victim in need of assistance or protection.
To combat the effects of dehumanizing language like NHI and to force public accountability, communities began organizing for the necessary use of the term victim. However, many people, especially women, felt that the term was cold, inhumane, silencing, and disempowering. Resource organizations pivoted to using survivor instead to aid in the creation of a more empowering framework for those who have experienced harm.
Language is a complicated game.
