FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Everyone’s a victim of something these days – it’s time we toughened up.

Katie Glass takes a critical look at victimhood

Iknew little about Terry Waite before I interviewed him. But after doing my research, I was blown away.

Many of you will know he was a hostage negotiator in the 1980s. An aide to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was taken hostage himself in Beirut for 1 763 days. Almost five years. He spent most of it in isolation, chained, blindfolded, with no stimulation – not even natural light.

There is a video of him on the tarmac at Heathrow after he was released in 1991. He’s telling jokes. Laughing about how he was freed without shoes, so had to ask the RAF, which had transported him, for some size 14s. ‘They called the navy and got two barges!’ he cackles.

Waite’s attitude during his captivity, and since, is: ‘No regrets, no self-pity, no sentimentality.’ I love the way he maintained his sense of humour, self-control and understanding, even during his darkest moments. It made me think how rare those qualities have become.

Now we live in a different era, one that instead of fostering a culture of survival seems to celebrate victimhood – in which people are encouraged to cling to every perceived injustice, keen to claim that they are oppressed.

Sometimes it feels like a race to the bottom, in which oversensitivity and intolerance cause people to celebrate adversity, even seek it. So every gender disparity is ‘sexism’. Every social mishap is harassment. Every disagreement is hate speech or a ‘phobia’. And everywhere that isn’t a ‘safe space’, a potential threat.

You can claim to be a victim of almost anything now: your gender, your class, your race, your choices, beauty norms, heteronormativity. Charlotte Proudman, the barrister complimented by a male solicitor on LinkedIn for her looks, became a ‘victim’ of being called good-looking.

It’s interesting what happens when someone tries to resist this narrative. Chrissie Hynde, for example, was accused of ‘victim blaming’ after she told the UK’s The

Sunday Times magazine that a sex attack she endured at 21 was partly her fault. No wonder victim status is coveted by so many, when it confers so many benefits. The pity game has become profitable: some people land book deals out of it. They gain status and respect, like Rachel Dolezal, who lied about being a target of racial abuse and raised her profile.

Showing yourself to be a sufferer attracts sympathy and immunity – you can never be wrong. Or even questioned, it seems – because that would be ‘victim blaming’. Which is why last year,

Rolling Stone magazine failed to properly question a girl who, it turned out, had been lying about being raped on a US campus.

There are problems with this culture of victimhood, not least that it infantilizes us. When you see yourself only as prey, you don’t take responsibility for your actions. A culture of victimhood sets up a false dichotomy between victim and bully (see the current gender war) that’s hard to resolve. And risks encouraging people to amplify their victim status rather than their courage.

Perhaps victim culture swells from a genuine desire for equality, but if we don’t move forward, we risk being defined by our problems. The real problem with highlighting every nano-aggression is that, ultimately, you minimise real harm. Crying wolf leaves people apathetic to serious victims.

What I admire most about Waite is how he took control of a situation in which he had none. Why celebrate being a victim? I’d rather celebrate our capacity to overcome.

Now we live in a different era, one that instead of fostering a culture of survival seems to celebrate victimhood.