Victimisation Quotes

“If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.”
― Bret Easton Ellis

“Research on organised abuse emphasises the diversity of organised abuse cases, and the ways in which serious forms of child maltreatment cluster in the lives of children subject to organised victimisation (eg Bibby 1996b, Itziti 1997, Kelly and Regan 2000). Most attempts to examine organised abuse have been undertaken by therapists and social workers who have focused primarily on the role of psychological processes in the organised victimisation of children and adults. Dissociation, amnesia and attachment, in particular, have been identified as important factors that compel victims to obey their abusers whilst inhibiting them from disclosing their abuse or seeking help (see Epstein et al. 2011, Sachs and Galton 2008). Therapists and social workers have surmised that these psychological effects are purposively induced by perpetrators of organised abuse through the use of sadistic and ritualistic abuse. In this literature, perpetrators are characterised either as dissociated automatons mindlessly perpetuating the abuse that they, too, were subjected to as children, or else as cruel and manipulative criminals with expert foreknowledge of the psychological consequences of their abuses. The therapist is positioned in this discourse at the very heart of the solution to organised abuse, wielding their expertise in a struggle against the coercive strategies of the perpetrators.
Whilst it cannot be denied that abusive groups undertake calculated strategies designed to terrorise children into silence and obedience, the emphasis of this literature on psychological factors in explaining organised abuse has overlooked the social contexts of such abuse and the significance of abuse and violence as social practices.”
― Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

“The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga

“In place of a firing squad, I stare down the barrels of endless interrogation.
Why did she not run away?
Why did she not use the opportunities she had for escape?
Why did she stay if, indeed, the conditions were as bad as she claims?
How much of this wasn't really consensual?
Let me tell you a story. Not mine, this time around.
It is the story of a girl we call after the place of her birth, lacking the integrity to even utter her name. The Suranelli Girl.
Forty-two men rape this girl, over a period of forty days.
She is sixteen years old.
The police do not investigate her case. The high court questions her character. The highest court in the land asks the inevitable. Why did she not run away? Why did she not have the opportunities she had for escape? Why did she say, if need, the conditions were as bad as she claims? How much of this wasn't really consensual?
Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape. The shaming is in being asked to stand for judgement.”
― Meena Kandasamy, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

“Worst of all, with every victim, who is deliberately silenced to preserve the peace, we are creating a new minority. Through deliberate neglect, the left creates what they fear the most: a non-ethnic group of people that will not blink an eye, when violent crimes are committed. No one cared when it happened to them, so why should they? An eye for an eye...as they don't use them anyway.”
― Anita B. Sulser PhD, We Are One

“Those who persecute others are warding of knowledge of their own fate as victims.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence