Abstract
Young people who have experienced sexual violence describe themselves as stuck between two seemingly opposing stereotypes: the “broken” victim and the “healed” survivor. Their responses to these labels are shaped by and shape how they feel about their other social identities.
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During our Zoom interview, Avni, an Indian medical student, leaned toward the camera to emphasize her point. “Like, your identity is the things that you like to do with people, like, you like to be with. And your, your job. But not THAT; that’s not your identity.” Avni, like the other young people I interviewed, had experienced sexual violence. She thought about it frequently and considered it an important part of her personal history. However, she did not define herself as a survivor—or a victim—and would not want others to describe her that way.
Today, scholars, organizers, and reporters often use “survivor” instead of “victim” when referring to people who experience sexual violence, which includes sexual harassment, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. Indeed, as campus sexual violence received national coverage in the 2010s, some student advocates sought to mainstream the term survivor, calling on their universities to change policies to prioritize its use over victim. Some of my friends in college even referred to victim as “the ‘V’ word,” insisting that we use “survivor.”
Curious about these label preferences, I interviewed 30 young people marginalized by gender—women, trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people—as they experience higher rates of sexual violence than their cis men peers. For participation recruitment, I sought “people who have experienced sexual violence” via listservs, social media, and snowball sampling. Participants all experienced at least one form of sexual violence, typically sexual assault, as well as intimate partner violence, sexual harassment, and stalking. They experienced violence at different stages of their lives, and it was committed by family, friends, strangers, and colleagues. At the time of our interviews, some students were in college, others had recently graduated, and others were in graduate school; all had been on campuses in the last five years. All had attended (or were attending) a four-year college, but they came from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and varied in their race, gender, and sexual identities.
In interviews in person and over zoom, I followed an interview guide I’d built to explore the question: How do young people who have experienced sexual violence make sense of the survivor and victim labels and incorporate them into their identities? I focused on those who were attending, or had recently attended, college, because campuses are often a hub of organizing, and sexual violence on campus was a pressing political issue at the time. By interviewing current and recent students, I sought out people who were likely exposed to anti-violence organizing.
Sexual Violence and The Perfect Victim
The definitions of sexual violence, victims, and perpetrators in the United States have changed over time, as historian Estelle Freedman explains in Redefining Rape. Shaped by historical legacy, a “perfect victim” is a White woman who physically resists penetrative sexual assault by a man, especially a man of lower social status. Such stereotypes about what constitutes sexual violence, who can be a victim, and who is a perpetrator, however, can exclude many instances of sexual violence. Further, these stereotypes shape outsiders’ attribution of blame and credibility.
These stereotypes about the perfect victim can also affect how people who experience sexual violence describe their experiences. If someone’s experience deviates from the perfect victim narrative, they may believe the incident was not serious enough to constitute sexual violence or that they do not “count” as either a victim or a survivor. This is particularly true for marginalized people, such as women of color and LGBTQ people, who are excluded from the perfect victim narrative. For example, sociologist Shawn McGuffey explains how Black women who have been raped confront stereotypes about being a strong “Black Superwoman,” which shapes how some women respond post-violence.
Similarly, in Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus, public health scholar Jennifer Hirsch and sociologist Shamus Khan find that college students who experience sexual violence, as defined by researchers, sometimes avoid labeling their experience sexual violence and themselves as victims because the labels interfere with their perceptions of themselves as strong, capable people.
Confronting stereotypes about the strong “Black Superwoman” shapes how some women respond post-violence.
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In response to negative victim stereotypes and the debate over the extent and cause of sexual violence, some feminists began using the term survivor rather than victim to emphasize the harmed person’s strength, defining them by their resistance instead of defining them by an action someone else took. Both the victim and survivor labels remain socially important. Some survey research suggests that people prefer describing themselves as survivors compared to victims, and they may experience more positive emotional outcomes when they do so. Research by sociologist Paige Sweet also shows that embracing survivorhood can shape access to institutional resources; she describes how women who have experienced domestic violence paradoxically perform strength to institutional gatekeepers to access resources that address the consequences of domestic violence.
In my work, I build on prior research to examine how young people who have experienced different forms of sexual violence make sense of both the survivor and victim labels as possible identities. Studying these labels among a diverse group of young, college-educated people allows us to better understand the consequences of violence, as well as the ways the adoption and rejection of terms figure into identity formation.
Victim vs. Survivor
Aligned with other research on sexual violence and victims, all but three of my participants distanced themselves from the victim label. As Sam, a White nonbinary college student, put it, a victim is “someone who’s super like, helpless, like hopeless just like… in need of saving.” They did not see themself as a victim because they did not see themself as weak or helpless, and they believed it would be “kind of disempowering” if someone else were to call them a victim.
The weakness associated with victim was all-encompassing, denying participants’ complex realities and self-perceived strength. In this framing, a victim was someone who was weak and broken; the label described their overall character, not just their behavior during their violent experience(s). Ben, a White and Mexican-American man college student, explained that, to him, being a victim means acting “almost like it’s dictating your life, you know?” Because he did not want the label to control his life, and because he did not see himself as broken or weak, Ben avoided using “victim,” but struggled to label his experience.
Another person who rejected the victim label was Carla, a Latina woman who had recently graduated from college. For her, the term “survivor” helped her label and accept the sexual abuse she had experienced as a child. “When I was introduced to the term survivor, I actually had an easier time accepting what had happened because I didn’t identify with victim.” As she explained, she felt too “resilient” to think of herself as a victim. Instead, the term “survivor” helped her look at her experiences in a new light.
In contrast to victim, participants described survivor in active terms, emphasizing strength. They described the victim and survivor labels as opposites on a continuum: broken victims versus strong survivors. Abigail, a Black woman graduate student, told me, “Survivor in my mind means that you’ve come through something; like, a victim is like you’re still in it. So, like, survivor’s like…You came out the worst of it. And you came out of the storm.”
“The storm,” as Abigail described the period following violence, included depression and other struggles with mental health, as well as broken relationships with family, friends, teachers, and acquaintances. Mental health struggles and social ramifications affected participants’ career and school performance. While avoiding labeling their experience as sexual violence or themselves as victims may have helped some participants maintain their self-perceptions as strong people, they nonetheless experienced negative repercussions stemming from violence. In other words, avoiding the victim label did not prevent common impacts of trauma.
Abigail said that becoming a survivor was a process that took time and effort. Across my interviews, people relayed that they expected to become healed over time, but time alone did not seem to dictate this healing process. There was not a set amount of time, such as a few months or even years after an experience with violence, that people indicated they struggled through before they “moved on.” Anna, a graduate student who was harassed a month before our interview, seemed frustrated that she still suffered, and she asked me when she was going to “get better.” Similarly, Kelly, an Asian nonbinary graduate student who was sexually abused as a child, decades before our interview, noted, “I still carry a lot of like anger and hatred.” Because Kelly had not, in their estimation, “moved on,” they did not consider themself a healed survivor.
Andrea, a Black and Latina woman college student, also emphasized the healing process. As she told me, “survivor is more about having gone through that process and having taken care of yourself. And, like, you’re at a point where you’re more… you’re stronger than ever.” Becoming a survivor, it seemed, did not just mean that people had literally survived post-violence. Instead, a survivor was morally worthy, even transformed. Being a survivor meant being a strong, healed person—some people rejected the victim label but did not see themselves as ready to step into the survivor identity.
Perhaps reflecting the feminist origins of the term survivor, some participants described a survivor as someone who advocates for other people who have experienced sexual violence. Abigail explained that when she began describing herself as a survivor, she thought, “I’m going to be active… I’m a survivor, I’m gonna help other people, make things better.” Survivors, according to this understanding, are morally worthy not just because of their strength, but also because of their advocacy on behalf of others.
The Perfect Survivor
Although they regarded survivors positively, participants struggled to become the healed, strong survivor. They described a perfect survivor narrative, which, like the perfect victim narrative described in the literature, created a stereotype about what a survivor should be. The “survivor” label was not just empowering, but also limiting.
The weakness associated with the label “victim” was all-encompassing, denying participants’ complex realities and self-perceived strength.
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Tracey, a Latina woman graduate student, found “survivor” a constraining label. She publicly shared her experience with reporting sexual violence to campus authorities, and she was described as a “survivor” in the press. She felt pressure to act as a strong survivor who was ready to help other people who had experienced sexual violence. But while she tried to seem healed, she struggled with her mental health. Today, after college, she prefers not to use either the victim or survivor label, wary of the cultural weight they carry.
To the participants, being a survivor meant being a strong, healed person—some people rejected the victim label but did not see themselves as ready to step into the survivor identity.
Immediately after a boy sexually assaulted them at a public event, Alex, a White nonbinary college student, remembered they were praised by peers for seeming strong. They recalled, “I felt like people were calling me strong because they were like, ‘You’re so able to be stoic and not evince the symptoms of being crazy and feeling horrible.’“ Even though they were suffering, the imposition of this label by others made Alex feel like they should be a strong survivor who did not show other people that they needed support.
Because they associated survivor with strength and healing, some participants did not yet feel like survivors, but they hoped to be survivors someday. Overall, fourteen participants told me they preferred the term survivor to victim, but of these, few felt comfortable embracing that label. Sage, a Black woman graduate student, explained, “I’m in a middle ground where I think I still feel too much shame to feel like a survivor, but I don’t want to feel the weakness and fragility that comes with being a victim, either.”
They were suffering, but others’ notions that they were “strong” made Alex feel like they shouldn’t reach out for support.
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The tie between strength and survivorship presented a particular challenge for Black women. “Especially being a Black woman,” Andrea emphasized, “I think we’re already meant to be strong, or told to be strong and all these things, so to me, like, ‘I’m a survivor’ is like, that’s not really helping me get better, or feel better, or heal.” Reflecting on the survivor label, Andrea, a Black and Latina woman college student, did not feel freed from a negative stereotype about victims of sexual violence but burdened with an existing one about Black women.
Experiencing violence, and viewing themselves as survivors and/or victims, shaped how people felt about their other social identities.
Similarly, cultural narratives of immigrants as strong and resilient shaped how children of immigrants viewed their experiences with violence. Melissa, a Latina woman who had recently graduated college, told me, “I don’t feel strong enough to be a survivor.” She was worried about telling her mother about being sexually assaulted, anticipating her mom would say, “‘Oh, I suffered when I moved here to this country,’ so, like, ‘what’s the big deal?’ You know, ‘I made it, I survived.’“ While expectations to perform strength and achieve success were not exclusive to participants who were the children of immigrants, these and other participants’ responses show how the perfect survivor narrative can interact with other cultural narratives and expectations.
Who Am I?
While some participants liked identifying as a survivor, most described it as a background label. Their experience with violence did not define who they were. Ben said, “It always is there, if that makes sense. It is there even just as faint background noise in all the things that I do… I do think that it is always going to be there a little bit. And, like, maybe it’s like having the TV on in the background and it’s, like, almost muted, but you can kind of hear it still—like, that’s kind of what it is.” To this end, participants distanced themselves from being defined by the violence.
Experiencing violence, and viewing themselves as survivors and/or victims, shaped how people felt about their other social identities, including their gender and sexuality. After being sexually assaulted in high school, White woman college student Olivia thought, “Oh, I’m a woman now, like, I have this thing.” For Olivia, experiencing violence tied her to her womanhood. On the other hand, Melissa distanced herself from her femininity, which she used to embrace. Post-sexual assault, she said, “I was afraid to express, like, anything feminine. I really didn’t want to call attention [from] men.”
LGBTQ participants struggled with stereotypes about victimization and gender and sexuality that cis, straight participants did not face. Some LGBTQ participants were troubled by the stereotype that they were “made” LGBTQ through sexual violence, like when Alex’s dad asked them if they were coming out because they had been sexually assaulted. While Alex knows they are not non-binary because of the sexual assault, the stereotype and response from their father left them with an “odd mix of emotions” that shaped how they thought about “expressing [their] femininity.” While the victim and survivor labels, as well as their limitations, were similar for participants across gender and sexuality, openly embracing the survivor or victim labels while being openly LGBTQ came with additional complications.
Becoming A Survivor
We attach meaning and cultural images to identity labels. The people I interviewed, all of whom had experienced sexual violence, continued to view a victim as a broken, weak person. Their reflections on their own experiences were influenced by “the perfect victim narrative,” an exclusive narrative that limits which experiences with violence are considered “real” or “bad enough.”
I describe the “perfect survivor narrative” as a cultural image of a survivor as a strong, healed person who has “moved on” from the violence. As someone who is strong, a survivor appears more morally worthy than a “broken” victim. Because participants did not feel like they were completely broken or fully healed, most described themselves as somewhere between a survivor and a victim. While “survivor” was defined as empowering overall, it did not displace the victim identity or create a clear path to avoid the stigmatization associated with experiencing sexual violence. In general, the young people who shared their stories with me avoided using either label as an identity.
The path from “broken victim” to “strong survivor” was echoed across my sample. While there were many commonalities across those I interviewed, there were also some differences. The image of a strong survivor was not healing or accessible to all the young people I interviewed. Black women described pressure to be strong due to stereotypes about Black womanhood, for instance, and how it distanced them from the term survivor. The children of immigrants similarly struggled with expectations that they be strong and resilient. Due to cultural stereotypes, labeling the violence and describing themselves as survivor or victims was also more complicated for LGBTQ participants than it was for their straight, cis peers.
Instead of calling people survivors or victims, scholars and others should avoid attaching an identity label to an experience. The descriptor “people who have experienced sexual violence” is accurate without attaching the cultural imagery and stereotypes associated with “survivor” and “victim.” Depending on the context, describing people as “targets,” “victimized people,” or “impacted people” may also be appropriate, yet these may also come with limitations.
However, language use alone will not change the cultural narratives described by the young people I interviewed. The cultural imagery associated with victim and survivor is influenced by broader political and cultural narratives that valorize individual strength and responsibility. Like Rebecca Stringer and other feminist scholars, I argue that we can challenge negative, individualized connotations of victimhood. We can decouple the broken vs. strong and victim vs. survivor binaries. Likewise, we can challenge the broader idea that people who experience violence should heal or “move on” along a linear timeline and become “stronger” than they were before the violence.
Reactions to trauma are complex. Some days people feel as though they have “moved on,” while other days they feel like they are “stuck in it.” We can support people by validating their experiences and reactions, recognizing the emotional, material, and social repercussions of violence, and offering support, as appropriate. Whether they are a victim, a survivor, or neither, people who experience sexual violence deserve support.
Study participants described the victim and survivor labels as opposites on a continuum: broken victims versus strong survivors.
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