When people survive violence, they often face a second violence sometimes described as more traumatic and harmful than surviving the former: the demand to prove they are “true” victims. Courts, media, and even families expect them to perform traits like gratitude, helplessness, innocence, and moral purity. Only then are they recognized as “valid.” This dynamic is at the heart of Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (2024), but it goes far beyond Palestine. It reflects deep psychological and structural mechanisms that maintain power — from families to workplaces, from capitalist markets to global politics.
The problem begins with the ambiguous meanings of involved psychological concepts different people – influenced by background and status – use differently. One example for this is respect. It has at least two very different meanings:
- Respect as recognition: treating someone as a human being, worthy of dignity and empathy.
- Respect as obedience: treating someone as an authority, requiring submission.
Abusive powerholders often conflate the two: “If you don’t respect me as an authority, I won’t respect you as a person.” This twisted logic justifies withdrawing empathy from those who challenge power. Survivors who express anger or dissent are objectified or – in case of severe violence like genocide – even dehumanized and demonized, their experiences invalidated, their suffering minimized. They are told, implicitly or explicitly: “You’re no longer a victim, because you didn’t play the grateful role.” As every survivor of abuse knows the demand for gratefulness is a core characteristic of the abuse, either for the abuse itself (demanded by the abuser) or in the rare cases help is being offered for the support (by “empathic” bystanders of the abuse).
Psychological research showed decades ago that people are biased in their perception of victims. Survivors who do not appear “innocent” or “coherent” enough are denied recognition and validation (cf. Janoff-Bulman, 1992). This bias helps protect the just world belief — the comforting illusion that the world is fair (Lerner, 1980). This illusion functions not only as a psychological defense but as a defense of hierarchy: if victims are partially blamed, the powerful can remain unquestioned.
This conditionality is not accidental but a product of intergenerational, patriarchal, colonial socialisation of our psychological processing reciprocally shaping the societal structures we live in. It serves concrete social functions: it keeps power intact, silences dissent, and shifts the burden of proof onto the harmed rather than the harming.
Children often first encounter this logic in families and schools. In abusive or authoritarian families, care is conditional: children are treated kindly only when they are compliant and grateful. Expressions of anger or resistance invite punishment (Garbarino, 2017). Something not only German speaking adults these days most likely witnessed as this kind of “pedagogy” was a major part of the “Gleichschaltung” in Nazi-Germany (cf. Jenik & Grad, 2021). Schools reproduce this pedagogy by rewarding obedience over critical thought. A deeply ambiguous message as critical thinking is being demanded explicitly while the structures implicitly reward obedience. The current development even partly goes backwards as structural sexualization cases and bullying rates in many countries show. Children who question authority are stigmatized or bullied (cf. Volk et al., 2014) by authorities, thus more likely by (obedient) peers. In this way, young people learn that dignity is conditional on conformity — and that “respect” (in both meanings introduced) flows upward, never downward.
The same logic plays out in abusive workplaces. Here, loyalty is rewarded more than competence (cf. Ashforth, 1994). Workers who resist abuse or question unfair practices risk being labeled “difficult.” They are excluded from recognition, as if their harm is invalid simply because they did not act submissively enough. This erodes not only individual well-being but also collective critical thinking. Organizations built on loyalty rather than contribution create cultures of silence, fear, and complicity. Harmful feigned concern (cf. Kinskofer, 2025) can enforce the need to perform a “perfect victim” to keep included if self-worth is low and/ or the financial dependency on the income high. This might even lead to persistent psychological changes validating the abusers perspective, e.g. by becoming that “little crazy one” in the end.
On the economic level, capitalist dynamics intensify this demand for “perfect victims.” in economic dependency. Terry Pratchett’s “Boots theory” captures it well: the poor must repeatedly buy cheap boots that wear out quickly, while the rich can afford durable boots that last (Pratchett, 1993/2023) saving money in the long run that is not even needed. The same applies to psychological currency especially if the poor are responsible for others, like children. Poverty itself forces people to appear needy, grateful, and submissive in order to receive charity, welfare, or sympathy to be able to afford cheap boots – or food, or safety in a genocide. Those who resist or demand structural change are delegitimized: “If you were that poor you´d be grateful. You don’t look like a victim.” A rhetorical strategy that lies at the core of right-winged populism against migrants delegitimizing their human needs while exploiting them. One could say, as slavery was abolished a new mechanism was founded to obtain (economic) power in the rise of capitalism.
This logic protects capitalist hierarchies. By making support conditional on obedience and gratitude, the system diverts attention from structural inequality to individual morality. Instead of asking why poverty or violence exists and how structures need to change to prevent poverty, the focus shifts to whether the affected person plays the role of the “deserving victim.”, thus who is being considered worthy to be poor. A cruel paradox.
From a human rights perspective, this is a profound distortion. Human rights should be – no, are – unconditional: dignity and protection are not earned, but inherent. Yet in practice, recognition is uneven.
- In media coverage, certain victims are portrayed as sympathetic (e.g., children, passive women), while others are delegitimized (e.g., minorities who protest). Mohammed El-Kurd’s book even described the internalized aspect as being in a place of survival due to the violence of the perpetrator.
- In courts, victims of violence are often required to demonstrate their innocence, moral purity, or emotional restraint to be believed (cf. Fassin & Rechtman, 2009). Trauma responses such as anger or fragmented memory are misinterpreted as unreliability.
- In various every day contexts as described above, minorities, migrants, and marginalized groups often face a higher bar for recognition. Their suffering must be proven in ways that majority victims’ suffering is not.
This creates an intersectional hierarchy of victimhood, fundamentally undermining the universality of human rights and the right for development of every human being in the best way possible. What´s possible for someone is engraved in their background, status – and performance.
The “perfect victim” narrative also structures international politics. European leaders’ highly publicized visits to Washington in August 2025, emphasizing their gratitude for U.S. concern over Ukrainian children, are not purely just gestures of solidarity. They play into an imperial theatre in which empathy (in particular for suffering children, who are implicitly considered to have a “high empathic currency value”) is performed for political capital. Recognition of Ukrainian suffering becomes entangled with U.S. power ambitions, including attempts to secure symbolic achievements such as a Nobel Peace Prize. Selective empathy thus serves diplomatic purposes: by highlighting some victims and silencing others, leaders demonstrate loyalty to hegemonic power. What looks like compassion is often strategy — and the condition is always gratitude.
The contrast becomes clearest when considering Palestine. While Western leaders express deep concern for Ukrainian civilians, Palestinians are routinely denied recognition as victims unless they appear peaceful, passive, and “deserving.” Any resistance disqualifies them. A power imbalance to be observed in a lighter form in the beginning 2025 when the Ukrainian president visited the US, once again stressing the diplomatic value of a “perfect victim” in international diplomacy that is more and more reliant of authority rather than cooperation. This selective recognition is not a moral accident — it is political design.
The U.S. administration, while positioning itself as a global guardian of human rights (while withdrawing from international and supranational surveillance), is complicit in what many scholars, activists, and human rights organizations identify as genocide in Palestine. By supplying military aid, shielding Israel from accountability at the United Nations, and shaping media narratives, the U.S. ensures that Palestinians may not be perceived as victims, not even “perfect victims.” Instead, their suffering is reframed, minimized, or erased by delivering a peace theatre with the perpetrator. In this light the appeasement strategy of global (former) partners seems even more dangerous to the victims as well as the long term global security and balanced relations.
Across all these levels, the narrative of the “perfect victim” seems to intensify by global (social) media and functions to:
- Protect illusions of fairness – shielding the belief in a just world (Lerner, 1980).
- Maintain hierarchies – ensuring authority is not challenged.
- Deflect responsibility – shifting attention from systemic harm to individual “worthiness.”
- Enforce obedience – conditioning recognition on compliance.
- Sustain economic inequality – keeping structural poverty intact (Pratchett, 1993/2012).
- Legitimize selective human rights – granting dignity only to “acceptable” victims (which is a contradiction in itself for the sake of power).
- Stabilize imperial power – instrumentalizing selective empathy for geopolitical goals.
From families to schools, from workplaces to states, and from local economies to global politics, the demand for “perfect victims” is a tool of (abusive) hierarchy. It objectifies people, invalidates their harm, and divides victims into “deserving” and “undeserving”. When European leaders stage gratitude for U.S. concern, they reproduce this logic on a global scale. When Palestinians are denied recognition as victims, it shows the devastating endpoint of conditional empathy: human rights turned into selective privilege to secure power and play golf while being courted of formerly regulating partners, out of survival, out of ignorance or out of convenience?
To move beyond this, we must recognize and reject the politics of “perfect victims” in every day life. Unconditional respect as the recognition of humanity is the sole basis of meaningful encounters that construct common ground for future — not submission to authority, not gratitude to power. Only then can we challenge the structures that sustain violence, inequality, and silence.
References
Ashforth, B. E. (1994). Petty tyranny in organizations. Human Relations, 47(7), 755–778. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679404700701
El-Kurd, M. (2024). Perfect victims: And the politics of appeal. Haymarket Books.
Fassin, D., & Rechtman, R. (2009). The empire of trauma: An inquiry into the condition of victimhood. Princeton University Press.
Garbarino, J. (2017). Children and families in the social environment (3rd ed.). Routledge.
Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma. Free Press.
Jenik A, & Grad E. (2021) Prohibition of the attachment bond in the Third Reich. Arch Argent Pediatr, 119(4):221-223.
Kinskofer, F. (2025). Conceptual considerations: A concept of „feigned concern“ in contrast to genuine concern/ caring behavior. Blog post.
Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. Springer.
Pratchett, T. (2023). Men at arms. Penguin. (Original work published 1993)
Volk, A. A., Dane, A. V., & Marini, Z. A. (2014). What is bullying? A theoretical redefinition. Developmental Review, 34(4), 327–343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2014.09.001
simply human 