Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The emergence of the figure of the victim is the result of several distinct processes that gradually took shape and were subsequently specified in different historical conjunctures, processes that continued to intensify and converge until they culminated in a genuine anthropological rupture. In traditional societies and in the phases preceding modernity, the victim aroused little interest; the suffering of victims, and their physical and moral integrity—disregarded, denied, and destroyed—generated little concern. What victims had experienced as a result of violence and, if they survived, their trauma and existential difficulties were far less important than the meaning and implications of violence considered from the broader perspective of the community. The victim existed only insofar as he or she marked some kind of relationship with the social order, with the balances threatened by war or by natural catastrophe sent by the gods. In the case of a sacrificial victim, the victim’s pain went unheard, the cries were silenced, and the terrible nature of the suffering remained unperceived; as many anthropologists have explained, death was understood as a contribution to the community. In the case of crime, if criminal acts and delinquency were intolerable and had to be combated, this was because they challenged society, called the social bond into question, and disrupted order, rather than because of the harm they caused to victims.
Author: Michel Wieviorka
Institution: École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Language: Spanish
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4416582289