Helpless Victims Research Articles

Going Insane: Battered Muslim Women Reclaim a Positive Identity.

This study examines the process of identity negotiation of 15 Muslim women who resisted severe abuse by their husbands and extended family by becoming mentally ill and thereafter, divorcing. Content analysis of the interview narratives shows that these women were poor, married young, and endured years of battering, isolation, and silencing for the sake of family honor and children's well-being. Entrapped within a web of sociocultural norms legitimizing wife beating, and abusive extended family relationships that annihilate their voice by branding them as maj'nuna/insane, these women explained that they were terrorized helpless victims fearing the stigma of being labeled insane and the resultant harm to their children. With the deterioration of their health, threat of annihilation, and imminent danger to themselves and their children, these women broke through the normative oppressive framework by becoming maj'nuna/mentally ill. Detached from the extended family and no longer caring to endorse a label that discredited what they said or did, these women overtly resisted by escaping to the family of origin and/or mental health clinic to reveal the abuse, divorce, and seek treatment. Severing all family ties, and now residing in public housing, these women felt safe to renegotiate a favorable identity and reclaim the right to live with dignity. Implications/recommendations: (1) The criminalization of battering and prosecution of batterers is not enough to deter when cultural norms sanction battering, (2) additional diagnostic categories are needed to identify the precursors of battering within the strategies of overt and covert resistance battered women adopt in collectivistic cultures such as mental and neurophysiological dysfunctions, and (3) it is necessary to transcend the individualistic model titling battered women within the false dichotomy of victimization or agency as it fails to reflect battered women's experience in collectivistic cultures and their resistant strategies to abuse in the extended family.

Gender representation and stereotyping in Moroccan print media coverage of the 2023 Haouz Earthquake

ABSTRACT Natural crises often amplify and reflect preexisting societal inequalities, with varying impacts on women across different regions. This research paper examines gender representation in the visual coverage of the 2023 Haouz earthquake. Data was collected from images published in Morocco's leading Arabic newspapers – Assabah, Bayanalyawm, and Alayam. The study analyzes how these visuals frame gender and argues that they reinforce existing gender stereotypes and cultural norms in Moroccan society. The coverage often portrayed women in limited, gender-specific roles, depicting them primarily as helpless victims. While this approach elicited sympathy from readers and donors, motivating immediate support for those affected, it may also have exploited the politics of sympathy, inadvertently perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Contested Victimhood: (Un)Courting Victims of Terrorism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Despite the growing number of victims of terrorism globally, research is scant about a class of victims who, in theory, epitomize Nils Christie’s concept of the “Ideal Victim,” deemed worthy of public sympathy and social support. The difficult experiences of terrorism victims in Israel, particularly in military court proceedings as documented through interviews, court transcripts, and observations, highlight how the politicization of terrorism exacerbates secondary victimization for terror victims and their families. We postulate that, in addition to the adversarial legal system constraints victims experience in legal proceedings, victim identity in Israel is culturally eschewed in favor of a national(ist) meta-narrative that valorizes strength and self-reliance. A militarized Israeli society asserting its superior might is a symbolic rejection of a helpless victim status, historically forced upon Jews facing persecution and terror. We conclude that terror victims’ treatment mirrors a given society’s image of itself.

‘LIKE SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER’: ANIMAL AGENCY AND ECHOES OF THE HOLOCAUST IN WOLFDIETRICH SCHNURRE'S WRITING

ABSTRACTThis article examines the writings of Wolfdietrich Schnurre (1920–89) through a combined lens of zoocriticism and Holocaust studies. Drawing on Anna Barcz's concept of ‘vulnerable realism’, it posits an analogy between Jews targeted by the Nazis’ exterminatory programme, who struggled to articulate their suffering in the language of empirical historiography, and animals who, excluded from the human system of moral rights and laws, have no means of voicing the oppression they endure. The article argues, however, that, rather than portraying animals as mute and helpless victims, Schnurre's short stories – ‘Die Tat’, ‘Der Verrat’ and ‘Das Manöver’ (1958) – endow their nonhuman protagonists with moral agency and with an ensuing capacity to resist their tormentors. Read in dialogue with Schnurre's Holocaust novel, Ein Unglücksfall (1981), and in the light of the human–animal entanglement advocated by his writings, these stories can be interpreted as a subtle contestation of the idea of Jewish passivity during the Nazi era.

EXAMINING POWERS THROUGH SURYANI’S REPRESENTATION AGAINST SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WREGAS BHANUTEJA’S PHOTOCOPIER

This study examines the representation of woman against sexual violence in Photocopier, an Indonesian film directed by Wregas Bhanuteja. In film, women as sexual violence victims are often misrepresented through stereotyping as the helpless victims who need men’s help to deal with the situation or showing extreme violence against their perpetrators to exact revenge. If not stereotyped, women as sexual violence victims also tend to be fetishized as their victimized body often sexualized for erotic pleasures. In its protagonist, Sur, Photocopier took different approach by representing the victim as a woman with powers to fight against the sexual violence she experienced. This study focuses in examining how Sur exerts her powers and how those powers impacted the sexual violence case that she experienced. The study is conducted qualitatively using content analysis method which examines the visual aspects as well as dialogues from the film and applying Amy Allen’s theory of feminist power relation. The analysis identifies that Suryani possesses and exercises all three types of feminist power posed by Allen, which are “power-to,” “power-over,” and “power-with,” as a sexual violence victim. The study reveals that while the film tries to represent Sur as a powerful woman, she is also adjacently represented as a stereotypical powerless sexual violence victim who is helpless to fight against her perpetrators even after exercising all her powers both personally and collectively. However, such stereotypical representation may be necessary to show the reality of sexual violence victims and as a form of criticism against the mishandling of sexual violence case.

Looking for Safe Haven in a City Torn Apart by War: Narratives of agency from internally displaced persons in the southern Philippines

In this paper, I interrogate the dominant representation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in humanitarian discourse as helpless victims in need of rescue. Based on the stories of IDP women and gender diverse individuals in the Philippines affected by the Zamboanga City siege in 2013, I illustrate how they exercised agency to shape their trajectories of displacement. The capacity of Filipino IDPs to contend with their displacement is shaped by their power as bakwit (evacuees), and by their class and ethnoreligious identities. While Christian Filipino IDPs had access to material, financial, and social resources, allowing them to engage in temporary migration after displacement, Muslim Filipino IDPs with limited access to these same resources found themselves in unwanted mobility and prolonged situations of displacement. Yet, Muslim Filipino IDPs do not lack agency, as they continue to actively and consciously forge new strategies to regain a sense of home in extended exile. Ultimately, while identifying bakwit power as a useful conceptual tool to make legible how IDPs exercised control at different stages of their displacement, embracing such a framework should not negate the long history of political violence in the region that continues to keep some people on the move.

Engaging the postcolonial state: dam, forced relocation, and the Bhil Adivasi Group of the Narmada River Valley, India

ABSTRACT This paper shows the limits of the Global North activism related to environment and indigenous identity for the South to instead highlight the primacy of regional political processes. It studies the changing perceptions of the state and the consequent political strategies used by the marginalized Bhils. They faced submergence due to the Sardar Sarovar Dam on River Narmada in western India. The Bhils, categorized as ‘aboriginal tribe’ by the colonial regime, along with other groups, are popularly called Adivasi (original dwellers). The Narmada dam followed in the wake of their sociopolitical isolation due to state policies, loss of forest, and exploitation by dominant groups. The paper highlights the continuous attempts by the Bhils to adapt and constructively engage with the state as they first opposed the dam and later mobilized for their resettlement. They made transient alliances with various external activists rather than simply being helpless victims or heroic resistors.

Accuracy and Dignity: Staging Madama Butterfly in Occupied Japan

ABSTRACT Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly has long been viewed in Japan and abroad as demeaning Japan, portraying Japanese women as helpless victims of a cruel society, easily exploited by Japanese and American men. But a remarkable 1948 production by two Japanese men, Fujiwara Yoshie (1898–1976) and Aoyama Yoshio (1903–1976), reimagined the typical Euro-American staging to display their vision of a ‘real’ Japan, one they also believed most faithful to Puccini. Not only did their production mute the inequities present in the opera; it was initiated, funded, and fully supported by the US Troop Information and Education (TI&E) Section in Tokyo. Ultimately, the Fujiwara and Aoyama interpretation became the dominant staging of the opera worldwide for decades to come. Exploring the institutional, political, and popular interest in Madama Butterfly in occupied Japan, this article examines how this 1948 production bolstered the Cold War narrative of the US as a non-colonialist, democratizing power striving to liberate Japanese women while celebrating Japan’s ‘return’ to its native aesthetic traditions.

FOUCAULDIAN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF BATTERED MEN IN THE PHILIPPINES

By using Foucauldian analysis to examine how respondents and society viewed battered men, what their subjectivities entailed, what practices they engaged in, and the institutions that were influencing them, the study sought to identify the dominant discourses regarding Filipino battered men. The study identified four discourses, including namely: men must be tough/dominant, men as providers and problem-solvers, battered men as nakakahiya, and male victims are helpless. Positions like men being matapang, macho, dominant, padre de pamilya, providers, victims of financial abuse, nahiya, under de saya, helpless victims, and advocates from these discourses. Their subjectivities were influenced by these positions, which led them to believe that men must suppress their feelings to avoid displaying vulnerability, that they must always prove something to society, and that male victims are helpless in the Philippines. Therefore, these subjectivities influenced specific practices such as remaining mum about one's abuse, concealing their emotions, and just tolerating abuse at the expense of female partners. Contrarily, some people have practiced advocating for their rights as victims and amending the current law to protect male partners while having subjectivities regarding helpless victims in the face of the law. Those that have influenced the discourses are the institutions of society, family, relationships, and law.

Guilt and Grievability at War: Military Accountability and the Other in Mark of Cain and Battle for Haditha

This article conducts a critical reading of the British war films Mark of Cain (Munden, M., 2007. Mark of Cain) and Battle for Haditha (Broomfield, N., 2007. Battle for Haditha.). Establishing the significance of cultural representations for politics and collective memory, I first locate both films in their historical and cultural contexts before I offer analyses that focus on the representation of US and British soldiers, Iraqi insurgents, and Iraqi civilians. I argue that Mark of Cain dissects how misunderstood loyalty, peer-pressure, and military organization facilitated abuses by British soldiers against Iraqi prisoners, but at the same time narrowly frames the Iraqi other as either largely invisible threat or hyper-visible helpless victim. In contrast, Battle for Haditha draws a more sophisticated picture of the Iraq war as a complex political economy with shifting allegiances and blurring loyalties that problematizes self-other distinctions. This, I conclude, makes Battle for Haditha an anti-war film proper.

The poetics of identity making: precarity and agency in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim

ABSTRACT Bangladesh experienced a massive surge in humanitarian crises after the 1971 Liberation War due to the systematic use of violence at both public and private spheres. Fictional accounts of the post-conflict period depict women as subjected to institutionalised sexism and aggravated physical and mental violence. Critical studies on such narratives often reiterate a stereotypical and essentialising discourse surrounding women’s identity, characterising them as helpless and passive victims of discrimination and exploitation. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and agency, we argue that the Bangladeshi-born British writer Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim transcends victimhood narratives by creating a more nuanced image of woman as vulnerable victims and resisting subjects at the same time. The novel is preoccupied with notions of vulnerability, violence, religious zealotry, and family estrangement. The findings reveal that the precariousness of women in the post-war period is caused and aggravated by violence and oppression perpetrated at political, social, and religious spheres. Female characters like Maya and Piya are presented as empowered agents of transformation when it comes to vulnerable situations that render them as insignificant and precarious. The study concludes that the novel contests and alters the stereotypical representations of women embedded in normalising and hegemonic discourses.

Remembering Hagar and Her Son (Gen 21: 9–21): A Narrative Reading of Helpless Victims and Hopeful Survivors in the Wheel of Providence

Narratives are fundamentals of storytelling. In Biblical literature, narratives do not only tell what happened (the context for God’s revelation), they also indicate why what happened matters (the purpose of history). Employing a narrative methodology and a hermeneutic of identification as an interpretive approach, this article explores the Hagar–Ishmael narrative in Genesis 21: 9–21 against the background of those who have been marginalized, exploited, excluded, trafficked, and sitting in a wilderness of despair, struggle, and mistreatment and are in need of survival. The exploration seeks to understand the narrative structure, plot, characters, and themes within the text. The Hagar–Ishmael position is too painfully close to the realities of many today. In this narrative account, one finds a pitiable scene of human suffering and misery, and yet it is bounded by divine mercy and compassion. The stream of helplessness and consequent hope of survival shows that, no matter how mistreated people might have been, they can rise above their “victimization” and embrace the promises of God by staving off defeat, shaking off despair, and vanquishing discouragement. Thus with a hermeneutic of identification, readers are encouraged to identify with the characters, situations, and experiences described in the biblical narrative.

TINDAK PIDANA PEMERKOSAAN TERHADAP SEORANG WANITA DALAM KEADAAN TIDAK BERDAYA

The rising incidence of rape has captured public attention, presenting challenges in investigation, prosecution, and verdicts. Rape is defined as a violent act or threat of violence to coerce non-consensual sex with a woman, not one's spouse, exemplified in Decision Number 390/Pid.B/2021/PN Smn. This research delves into the theoretical and regulatory aspects of rape in Indonesia, particularly the application of Article 285 of the Criminal Code to helpless victims, posing questions about its appropriateness. Utilizing a normative approach with descriptive analysis, secondary data was collected through a literature review. The research concluded that the perpetrator's actions constitute 'exploitation rape,' and the victim qualifies as a 'pure victim' with no prior association with the offender. Furthermore, the perpetrator's actions more closely align with the elements of Article 286 of the Criminal Code.

Abeilles en série, crime au rucher…

Through the sentimental-criminal adventures of Audrey Astier the beekeeper, Valérie Valeix’s heroine, we discover how an ‘FSP’ (fiction with professional support) manages to take into account the honey people. However, bees, or their more aggressive cousins, wasps, can be the vectors of real horror scenes when they are used as predators or as weapons of mass destruction; it is their dark side, which makes them both personal friends and helpless victims of the mercantile madness of Men. There remains the constant parallel between the destiny of the apiary, threatened, indispensable and valiant, and our own world, vulnerable, prey to our self-destructive impulses, even if precious and essential: apis servat homines!

Tire to Cope up the Patriarchal World as Portrayed by Adichie in The Purple Hibiscus

Women worry about subordination, as well as other issues impacting the development of the Nigerian female, have been voiced from a number of different perspectives. Nonetheless, themes like as gender-based violence, religious extremism, domestic abuse, and violence are seldom addressed in post-colonial literature by first generation female writers, in contrast to the writings of the new generation of female writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As a result of the author’s works, it has been determined that patriarchy is an ideology that attempts to demonstrate that a woman’s primary role in life is that of a mother and wife. This classification has an impact on a variety of women, regardless of their educational background. Adichie provides a multifaceted rather than a simple picture of her characters in Purple Hibiscus. She has been successful in dismantling the stereotype of African women as a homogeneous group of hard-working, helpless, and self-sacrificing victims who are complacent in their inferior positions, as she has done. Beatrice is a character in Purple Hibiscus, and through her, she portrays a picture of an African woman who is oppressed by the dual burdens of patriarchy and illiteracy. She is unable to redefine herself or speak up for her rights, and she ultimately resorts to murdering her husband Eugene in order to save herself and her children from their ordeal. Due to her failure to assert her own rights early in the novel, she suffers the tragedy of her husband’s death as well as the imprisonment of her son, as well as the start of her insanity.

Informal sector counterpower in Harare, Zimbabwe

AbstractAfrican city governments have generally been harsh on the informal sector. Informal traders are considered a nuisance and unworthy of government support and are subjected to severe regulations and police harassment. The paper frames this anti-informal-sector approach in Harare, Zimbabwe, as sovereign power and the informal traders’ resistance as counterpower (after Foucault). We use the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA. to analyze their response to sovereign power. Our interviews with 50 informal street traders and 20 key informants revealed that this counterpower takes the form of good business practices, building on urban–rural linkages and disobeying the current bylaws. The traders also actively avoid damage from police raids by being mobile, not displaying all their goods, setting out goods on a sheet for quick removal when threatened, storing goods elsewhere, and paying bribes for information about police activity. Our findings contradict the view of the informal sector traders as helpless victims of government brutality.

Police Hostage Rescue Operation: Assessing Nigerian Police Alertness and Responses to Kidnapped Victims

Kidnapping and hostage-taking have plagued Nigeria for over two decades, beginning with protests in the country’s Niger-Delta region. Afterward, the phenomenon has spread like a Harmattan bush fire across the country’s length and breadth. Although the phenomenon evolved from sheer agitation it became the most thriving business, even though it is on the wrong side of morality. Evidently, the spectacle has drawn tremendous literature and a crow’s nest that range from its evolution to politics, socioeconomic consequences and alternative negotiation, among other concerns and worries associated with it. Going by studies, the phenomenon has resulted in atrocious ransom payments, inhumane treatment and even deaths of helpless victims. Connectedly, the unpleasant experiences of victims, especially at the hands of their captors, inform this discourse on the alertness and responses of the Nigerian Police to kidnapped victims, which is what has remained either under-assessed or significantly under-examined. Relying significantly on both primary and secondary data, this article assesses the main security institution entrusted with the internal security of the nation, viz-à-viz its response to victims’ calls via operational tools, manpower, training and education, intelligence and synergy with sister security agencies. This article concludes that inadequacies and deficiencies in these variables have stalled the timely rescue of victims by police forces in the country.

A Study of the Life of Thai Marriage Migrant Women in Korea: With a Focus on Their Economic Empowerment and Implications for Policy

Thai marriage migrant women in Korea are often perceived as less-educated, passive, financially dependent, and a helpless victim of domestic violence from a third-world country who migrated to Korea through matchmaking agencies to marry a much older Korean farmer or factory worker to provide her labor to his family. Despite the various efforts of the government to raise awareness of marriage migrants and multicultural families, the public prejudice against Thai marriage migrant women has not yet changed much. However, our interviews and interactions with Thai marriage migrant women gave us a different view of the matter. That is to say, many of them had a decent career in Thailand prior to marriage, and most importantly, they are eager to become a full and independent member of society through economic empowerment. In addition, to get themselves prepared for job market, they are proactively utilizing government-sponsored programs and other available resources. Although they do experience certain hardship as a foreigner, especially with regard to child-rearing, language and discrimination, it did not put a stop to their endeavor for self-empowerment. Keywords: Thai marriage migrant women in Korea, economic empowerment, vocational education, support for multicultural families

‘A shared commitment … not to be miserable’: a Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory to explore writing collaborative climate fiction

ABSTRACT This paper continues ongoing research, by the three authors, into possible ways to write climate fiction, a subgenre of literature that focuses on depictions of climate change. Curious as to whether climate fiction has become fixed as a negative genre, most frequently mired in dystopian landscapes, we posited that writing fiction collaboratively might be one method to help us imagine a future in which we have agency and are not simply helpless victims of the inevitable. To explore this hypothesis, we ran a two-day Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory with six other professional writers, all based on Kaurna and Permangk country in Tartanya/Adelaide, Australia. In detailing the setup and findings of this experiment, the paper looks towards artistic practice that does not focus on the capitalist individual and details the thrill of collaboration. We propose that there is a strong (posthuman) argument for writers to abandon the desire to be identified as one singular being with a ‘unique’ voice and reimagine their creative subjectivities as a sticky web of connections.

Challenging positions: agency and expectations in testimonial writing about genocide in Rwanda and war in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT This article explores Yolande Mukagasana and Semezdin Mehmedinović’s highly aestheticised testimonial writing about the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and the Bosnian War. My analysis of Mukagasana’s Not My Time to Die and Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues opens up a rich comparison that demonstrates the problematic nature of a social expectation and assumption that a survivor is active and strong in contrast to a passive and helpless victim. To unpack complexity of these categorisations, this article asks two questions: How do these two testimonies portray those who outlived violence and died as a result of it? What do these narratives tell us about the labels of a victim and survivor? After discussing the meaning of a victim and survivor in scholarship and local contexts, I will trace ways in which Mukagasana and Mehmedinović’s writing balances expressions of agency and recognition of the uncontrollable. The discussion will also examine actions that may appear less valuable or less visible than others and the implications of depiction of victims as active agents. The comparative analysis of the two literary texts complicates the categories of a victim and survivor, challenging the distance between the reader and those who outlived genocide or war.