Commentary
This is perhaps one of the worst phrases I’ve encountered in mental health circles.
First of all, “victim mentality” is not an academic or clinical term. It is not something that appears in the DSM-V or the ICD-11. It is a term forged through pop-psych and political rhetoric to dismiss the aftermath of trauma, particulary for those on the receiving end of oppressive policies. It is ambiguous enough that it blurs the line between someone who was actually a victim of a traumatic event and the perception people have that they are victims of an event. In fact, in many studies, this distinction is of little interest to the researchers who frame “victimhood” as a narrative that functions as a type of social credibility or personal rationalization.
“Self-defined victimhood is a psychological state whereby, regardless of the etiology of the feeling or the “truth” of the matter, one who perceives herself to be a victim is a victim (see Bayley 1991; Garkawe 2004). The perception of being wronged is victimhood (Zitek et al. 2010). We are not concerned with the “truth” of one’s victimhood.2 As such, concepts like intent to harm or genuine unfairness do not bear on self-defined victimhood. One must merely think of oneself in such terms, or behave in such a way, to “be” a victim (Jacoby 2015). The consequences of self-defined victimhood should manifest regardless of genuine victimization.”
From one study, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7778419/
I wasn’t exaggerating when I said actual trauma and victimization is not of interest to many of these researchers. They’re interested in the psychology of someone who has already declared themself a victim or has a predisposition towards doing so. In other words, “victim mentality” and “victimization” are terms used to assess the same qualities within a narcissist defending themselves as a someone articulating symptoms of PTSD.
This disregard for the truth value of victimhood claims is at best lazy, since the unfalsifiable nature of these propositions allow them to be repeated like any other cliche. “Everything happens for a reason” can be used in response to anything because it’s not falsifiable; you can easily claim that the reason exists but is just currently unknown. Similarly, “you have a victim mentality” can be used equally to describe a genuine victim of trauma and a narcissist who perceives themselves slighted. And you absolutely should not treat these as the same.
Research shows that trauma survivors are overwhelmingly likely to blame themselves than others for their own experiences. The entire fawn response within fight-flight-freeze-fawn is predicated on the idea that, by assuming responsibility for others and blaming oneself, one can reduce the chances of getting external punishment. A child being abused might think “adults are good because they take care of me, so when they hurt me, it’s because I’m doing something wrong, so I need to do more to be good.” This is a predictable process our brains use to both maintain a stable sense of the world where good things happen after good actions and search for new options to use in the future.
To someone like this, suggesting they have a “victim mentality” without assessing the truth value of the claim is activating that exact script that calls on them to blame themselves.
In the worst applications of this concept of “victim mentality,” institutional actors can avoid taking accountability for their complicity in a system by instead blaming individuals for expressing the way an action or policy impacts them. Without getting into specifics, I have heard people express misconduct or errors on behalf of facility staff members in groups or meetings, and the response is generally to ask what role the offended party played in that situation since that’s all they can control. Ironically, this is done in the name of bursting the bubble of learned helplessness, even as it engenders a sense that one is helpless to change their circumstances and is limited to changing mindsets.
There was an attempt by some researchers to create the construct of a “Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV)”, which measures four traits:
- a need for recognition
- moral elitism
- lack of empathy
- rumination
Do any of these traits have anything to do with actually being a victim? It seems like an antisocial or narcissistic personality test that’s being labeled as “victimhood”, which conveniently sweeps up abusers and victims into the same group with no acknowledge of the context between them. Rumination could easily be a facet of another disorder like depression or OCD, and is in fact pretty common in trauma victims who replay incidents as a PTSD response. “Need for recognition” is also one that can really depend on what “recognition” means; is someone who fawns attempting to gain recognition so that the offending party recognizes the fawning and deescalates the situation?
Also, the studies they refer to involve playing “The Dictator Game” on a computer, and they were told that they were playing against another person who had selfishly kept the money in the game for themselves. Individuals who scored higher on TIV assessments also engaged in higher levels of revenge-seeking that took money away from their opponent even if they didn’t get a reward themselves. They were also more likely to recall their hurt with more intensity and for longer duration.
I mean it’s genuinely astonishing someone would publish an article like this talking about the concept, and then also mention at the very end: “The relationship between seeing oneself as a victim and a history of actual trauma was unclear in this research.”
Yeah, no shit. It’s a computer game that’s explicitly framed in adversarial terms where the opponent seems to be playing selfishly without remorse. It doesn’t even slightly resemble a real-life situation with real-life stakes. It’s a short-term assessment of how someone feels after a game. I don’t doubt that there is some predictive value to this whole setup, especially if it picks out narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder, but it in no way provides an empirical basis for a construct like a “victim mentality.” TIV reflects a tendency within perceptual processing, whereas mentality implies entire thought processes.
If we look at the origins of the term, it becomes clear how “victim” has been tortured into meaning “claim of powerlessness” rather than “affected by trauma.”
“Victimology” was a term coined in 1947 by Benjamin Mendelsohn to describe the study of crime victims within the broader umbrella of criminology.
Early on, this meant a focus on “victim precipitation,” or the extent to which a victim is responsible for their victimization. In the context of a nation-state that imposes a system of laws on its populace, breaking the law is first an offense against state authority to maintain law and order, with the actual victim being a secondary consideration in the course of justice. Determining the victim’s role in the crime was thus driven by the goal of having a full accounting of people’s actions leading up to a law being broken.
The idea of “victim facilitation” qualified this by limiting the scope to unintentional actions that increased the risk of becoming the target of a crime. A woman whose drink is spiked with drugs at a bar is not blameworthy, but a victimologist might argue that leaving her drink unattended unintentionally raised the risk of being drugged and assaulted. On the flip side, “victim provocation” explicitly considers what the victim had done that might have incited another person to violence.
Notably, Mendelsohn was a lawyer who studied rape victims, and his victim typology that arose closely connected ignorance and voluntary participation in events preceding a crime with guilt. The category “victim with minor guilt” referred to victims who were either ignorant or unintentionally increased the risk of harm.
In 1948, Hans von Hentig published The Criminal and His Victim: Studies in the Sociobiology of Crime which sought to identify the characteristics of victims that made it more likely they would end up in a criminal-victim dynamic. He identified 13 types of characteristics that he reasoned were inherently associated with being victimized:
- young
- female
- old
- immigrant
- depressed
- mentally defective/deranged
- acquisitive
- dull normal
- minority
- wanton
- lonesome
- tormentor
- blocked, exempted, and fighting
Von Hentig posited that whether someone with these qualities ends up becoming a victim depends on the actions they take given those characteristics. For young women, it might be taking risks that attract the attention of criminals. For immigrants and minorities, it may be a failure to assimilate to a “civilized” culture while retaining their “primitive” ways. For the depressed and lonesome, they may fail to recognize danger or somehow seek it because of their mental state. Tormentors maintain a constant aggressive disposition that incites others into harboring ill will towards them that can escalate into violence.
Marvin Wolfgang in 1957 was the first person to look at empirical data in regards to victimization, identifying 26% of all homicides in Philadelphia as “victim precipitated.” His student Menachem Amir would claim 1 in 5 rapes in Philadelphia were “victim precipitated” through either wearing revealing clothing, using risky language, or having a reputation for promiscuity or deviance.
In 1968, some time after the victim typology trend started among victimologists, Stephen Schafer wrote The Victim and His Criminal: A Study in Functional Responsibility. He proposed seven categories,
Whether or not you were a victim of something has no bearing on what your choices are after, and so it has no bearing on your ability to choose a course for your life that’s best suited for you. Acknowledging that you were a victim of something only means you’re acknowledging that you were affected by it in a way you don’t like. You have a right to feel that way. You just don’t have a guarantee that anyone will treat you like a victim who deserves compensation or sympathy.
There’s also plenty of evidence to the contradictory of such a mindset existing. Neuroscientists have argued that what gets characterized as a “victim mentality” is often the autonomic nervous system reacting in predictable ways to trauma or executive dysfunction that goes deeper than mindset or cognitive distortions.
I would argue there is a pseudoscientific self-help-driven mindset at work here instead that takes a borderline religious view of mind-over-matter in a way Descartes would never have approved of.