When Victimhood Takes a Bad-Faith Turn

When the coronavirus pandemic started, the media scholar Lilie Chouliaraki, who teaches at the London School of Economics, knew she’d have to be more careful than many of her neighbors. A transplant recipient and lymphoma patient, she was at very high risk of serious illness. In her new book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, she writes that rather than feeling victimized by this situation, she was grateful to have the option of sheltering in place. Still, as the pandemic wore on and opponents of masking and social distancing in Britain—as well as in the United States and many other nations—began to claim that they were victims of government overreach and oppression, Chouliaraki grew both confused and compelled by the role that victimhood language was playing in real decisions about the degree to which society should reopen.

COVID isn’t the only recent context in which victimhood has gotten rhetorically vexing. At the height of #MeToo, in 2017 and 2018, the U.S. seemed to engage in a linguistic battle over who got to call themselves victims: those who said they had suffered assault or harassment, or those who stood accused of committing those offenses. In Wronged, Chouliaraki links this debate to pandemic-era arguments about public health versus personal freedom in order to make the case that victimhood has transformed into a cultural trophy of sorts, a way for a person not just to gain sympathy but also to accumulate power against those who have wronged them. Of course, people call themselves victims for all sorts of very personal reasons—for example, to start coming to grips with a traumatic experience. But Chouliaraki is more interested in the ways victimhood can play out publicly—in particular, when powerful actors co-opt its rhetoric for their own aims.

Central to Chouliaraki’s exploration is the distinction she draws between victimhood and vulnerability. She argues that victimhood is not a condition but a claim—that you’re a victim not when something bad happens to you, but when you say, “I am wronged!” Anyone, of course, can make this declaration, no matter the scale (or even reality) of the wrong they’ve suffered. For this reason, per Chouliaraki, victimhood should be a less important barometer for public decision making than vulnerability, which is a condition. Some forms of it are physical or natural, and cannot be changed through human intervention. As a transplant patient, Chouliaraki is forever more vulnerable to illness than she used to be. Other sorts of vulnerability are more mutable. A borrower with poor credit is vulnerable to payday lenders, but regulatory change could make that untrue (or could make payday loans affordable). Such an intervention, crucially, would protect not just present borrowers but future ones. Focusing on vulnerability rather than victimhood, she suggests, is a better way to prevent harm.

But Chouliaraki’s biggest objection to our increasing emphasis on victimhood is that it creates a strange inversion wherein “claims to victimhood are claims to power.” In her first chapter, which explores the growing correlation of victimhood with justice and even privilege, she does an excellent job establishing the real-world importance of her ideas. Her argument suggests that, although identifying yourself as a victim doesn’t guarantee redress, it’s often a necessary precondition. If you want help, in short, you have to convince someone with authority that you’ve been harmed—which is, on the individual level, the basis of most legal systems, and yet a principle that manifests more messily in public life. According to Chouliaraki, it’s far too easy for the privileged to exploit victimhood rhetoric. If attaining the social benefits of victimhood requires that authority figures believe you, she writes, then those benefits will often accrue more readily to those close to power.

She illustrates this phenomenon using Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings—an analysis that feels at once natural and revelatory. Ford told Congress that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school; Kavanaugh, who denied that the events she described took place, reacted by presenting himself as a fallible but fundamentally good man, not a perpetrator of harm but the victim of a smear campaign designed to keep him off the Supreme Court. Interestingly, Chouliaraki points out, some who supported Ford did so by praising her vulnerability as “actually a superpower,” which arguably erased the image of her as a person in pain. The tearful Kavanaugh, by contrast, “casting himself as a sufferer,” shortly thereafter ascended to the Supreme Court.

[Read: Christine Blasey Ford testifies again]

In Wronged, this story is both a warning against “victimhood culture” and an illustration of how claiming victimhood can collapse “systemic vulnerability and personal grievance … into one vocabulary.” Chouliaraki wishes to undo that collapse. Another is to help readers “recognize the suffering of the vulnerable for precisely what it is: a matter not of victimhood but of injustice.” Chouliaraki argues that contemporary victimhood rhetoric, with its emphasis on personal tales of pain, sets us up to do precisely the reverse—to be overly individualistic, even to cynically “compete for dominance,” as she argues Kavanaugh did with Ford. A result of this phenomenon is that the neediest, the most vulnerable, are put at an ever-greater disadvantage. Another, Chouliaraki argues, is that victimhood has too often become the rhetorical province of the powerful, sometimes even of the aggressor. We’ve gotten ourselves turned around.

Chouliaraki’s ideas shed a surprising amount of light on the writer Jill Ciment’s tense, slippery memoir Consent, in which Ciment asks herself whether she was a victim in her marriage to the painter Arnold Mesches, who was 30 years her senior. She was his student at the start of their relationship, in the early 1970s. She was also 17. (“Arnold was having an affair,” she writes acidly. “I was going steady.”) After his death in 2016, and what she calls the “sea change of the MeToo era,” Ciment found herself revisiting the origins of their relationship. She is unequivocal about the joy, tenderness, care, and creative partnership in their marriage—and yet she can’t suppress the question: “Me too?”

What Ciment is really asking, in Chouliaraki’s terms, is whether to claim victimhood. She plainly feels she ought to, though why she feels this way—solidarity with #MeToo? Duty to her younger self?—is murky; she just as plainly would rather not. Ciment is an immensely assured writer from sentence to sentence, which, to some degree, obscures her seeming confusion as she looks back on her relationship with Arnold. She ultimately “acknowledge[s] the predatory act of an older man kissing a teenager,” but does so while both honoring her past self, the girl “yearning for the kiss,” and validating the consensual, loving partnership that developed afterward. She remains uncertain, however, about what the acknowledgment of predation means—for her sense of the relationship, and of self. Consent is animated by this unsettled tension. Applying some of Chouliaraki’s ideas to it helps.

Chouliaraki points out throughout Wronged that people have been harmed without wanting to seek redress, or even to have the wider world acknowledge their victimhood. Consent is a slippery variation on this truth. Ciment wants to say publicly that she was vulnerable and should have been treated differently, both by Arnold and by the prevailing culture at the time, which too often seemed comfortable with relationships between teenage girls and adult men—“Wasn’t groupie culture just statutory rape?” she asks at one point. Still, she never quite says that she suffered. She seems to be trying to draw a distinction between damage and pain—which is, perhaps, related to Chouliaraki’s distinction between vulnerability and victimhood. Consent seems to argue that it’s only through luck, and Arnold’s essential goodness, that Ciment fundamentally doesn’t feel hurt, even if she thinks Arnold trespassed on (and cut short) her adolescence.

[Read: The literary-abuser type is everywhere]

Her faith in Arnold leads her to get stuck on the question of individual power. At the start of their relationship, he had far more than she did, though at the time—and in her 1996 memoir, Half a Life, which starts with her childhood and ends, as she puts it in the newer book, “at the age of consent”—she tried hard to pretend that wasn’t the case. But by the time he was in his late 80s and she was, to some degree, his caretaker as well as his wife, she indisputably had more power; she was the one, after all, whose “senses worked double time shepherding his body and mine through space [without pointing] out the cracked sidewalk” that both were too proud to admit he no longer noticed.

Consent’s second half, which deals with Arnold’s last years, is much weaker than its beginning. Its narrative gets choppier, more anecdotal. Ciment quotes Half a Life throughout Consent, but at its close, she starts citing her novels as well, a move that can seem as if she’s reaching for material. She also lifts a paragraph—the one with the line about steering him over cracked sidewalks—nearly wholesale from her most recent novel, The Body in Question. She seems much less motivated to investigate the last stage of their relationship, during which she was physically and socially more powerful than Arnold—which, perhaps, explains her unwillingness to see herself as a victim. If she calls herself such, she is gathering power to herself in the present, asserting that Arnold wronged her when she was young and she therefore deserves redress now. Ciment doesn’t want redress. She watched her husband age, shrink, sicken. She has no interest in asking for anything from that version of Arnold. Indeed, she hardly seems able to bear writing about him. Her grief does not include a desire to exact punishment.

Attempts to change the balance of power often suggest that we must take a weight from one side of the scale and place it on the other. Sometimes this is true: If, for instance, a school board is made up entirely of people who want to ban books featuring trans coming-of-age stories, then trans students lose the ability to see themselves reflected in what they learn at school. But in a more diffuse social context such as #MeToo, zero-sum rhetoric is sometimes less accurate, and less productive. Chouliaraki and Ciment certainly both resist it. Arnold was clearly more vulnerable in his old age than Ciment, and yet she doesn’t portray that time in their marriage as a reversal of its beginning, as a stage in which she had the power. Blurry though her evocation of those later years can be, the portrait that emerges is one of not just a caring, intimate relationship, but also an intellectual partnership that felt equal long after Arnold’s aging put Ciment in a position of some degree of dominance. It would seem that, though power rebalanced between them over the years, they also empowered each other creatively, an effect that sustained their relationship as well as their work.

Chouliaraki, operating on a much broader scale, suggests in Wronged that this is precisely what would occur if we could collectively abandon what she sees as the individualistic, competitive rhetoric of victimhood. She asks readers to rethink the language of I am wronged and turn instead to questions that are more basic, yet harder to solve: Who is in pain? What tangible protection can we give them? How can we keep others like them safe?  She seems to appeal less to the truly influential, whom she may see as a lost cause, than to her many potential readers who occupy a social middle ground: vulnerable in some ways, yet close enough to power that victimhood culture might benefit them. If those of us who are in that place reassess the appeal of victimhood, Wronged suggests, we can decrease others’ ability to use it in bad faith, or to conflate having to do something they dislike (wearing a mask, let’s say) with genuine pain.

More broadly, Chouliaraki turns our collective attention from the past—this happened to me—to the future: I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. We see glimmers of this attitude in Consent, which, in its last chapters, repeatedly describes Ciment’s discomfort when faced with other couples who look like her and Arnold. We also see Ciment’s dissatisfaction with focusing on the past. She appears to get little relief from concluding that, yes, her marriage started with a violation. She still loved Arnold, she still built a life with him, she still lost him, and she still lives in a society that allows men to prey on younger women, if not with as much impunity as in the ’70s. What is she—what are we—meant to do about that?