Victim Victorious

Book excerpt: The world is peopled by victims; everyone has a story. However, victimhood is just the beginning of the story. This book is about the endings of at least some of those stories, the stories of victims who strive to overcome and even triumph in the end. This book is a collection of research perspectives and personal stories exploring the various pathways for overcoming victimhood. It is hoped that they might offer an inspiration for others and encourage others to stay on the path to find a positive ending. Victim Victorious is an examination of the ways in which victims come to rise above the challenges that they face. Victims may be innocent bystanders, and in no way responsible for their victimhood. Nonetheless, they can -- and indeed we argue need to -- take responsibility for finding a personal solution. To assist in this task, this book chronicles the pathway of prejudice and how the pain and the damage experienced by individual victims may be overcome by effort, by and on their own behalf. The first half of the book features outsider views of victimhood. A range of professionals, philosophers, psychologists, criminologists and critical theorists offer their thoughts on how people might overcome victimhood. The second half of the book features insider views of victimhood; in this section, the victims speak for themselves about their experience and how they have endeavoured to break through their victimhood. This book is less about identifying and proscribing the behaviours of perpetrators and more about the efforts that victims can undertake to heal themselves as they journey towards resilience and victory.