Is ‘Victim-Survivor’ Our Imperfect Alternative to Describing People with Lived Experience of Sexual Violence? A Feminist Symbolic Interactionist Analysis, Considering How Ethnicity, Gender, and Disability Interact with Language Choice

Violence Against Women. 2025 Apr 30:10778012251338454. doi: 10.1177/10778012251338454. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Feminist violence and abuse literature is caught in the grips of a debate surrounding the most appropriate language to describe people with lived experiences of sexual violence. This article offers a theoretical tracing of the history of the normative framings of “victim” and “survivor,” and the emerging alternative “victim-survivor,” through a symbolic interactionist lens. Given that both “victim” and “survivor” labels hold distinct disadvantages in isolation, particularly among the survivor discourse for ethnic minority and disabled and male victim/survivors, “victim-survivor” offers an alternative, in a similar fashion to LGBTQ+, affording flexibility for victim/survivors to occupy a multi-dimensional form of identity.

PMID:40302539 | DOI:10.1177/10778012251338454