The Voice of Victims in Literature

“Always the innocent are the first victims, so it has been for ages past, so it is now.” The story of the victims has always been the same, whichever category they may belong, as J.K. Rowling speaks, in Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. Victims may be defined as a sufferer, the injured party or the prey. Victims of crime may be of any gender, age, race or ethnicity. Victimization may happen to an individual, family, group or community, and a crime itself maybe done on a person or property. The tales of the victims has always been so brutal. From ages back, people have been made victims and treated ferociously. 

 As readers, we have been moved for decades and even centuries with classic characters striving for change and not succumbing to victimization as an excuse for inaction: Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennett, Anna Karenina, Heathcliff, Emma Bovary, Captain Ahab, Charles Marlowe, Cinderella, etc. Literature has always found a way to express the lives of the victims of several of the society’s cruelest demeanor. Victims have always found their space in literature through which they have so far efficiently communicated with the readers and let the society know of their harsh realities and their survival. Victim literature in general, focuses on the issues of the victims of the society, no matter the categories they belong, be it physical, sexual, mental, psychological, or any other. The victim literature has opened a new arena to speak to the society and let them know what actually happens around them instead of merely fantasizing the world around them. It has provided the victims with an opportunity to speak of the troubles of the downtrodden, the marginalized, the victimized population who might have stood so close to the others in the society but left unnoticed. 

The sexual exploitation of children is one among the most brutal of the crimes performed, not only of the girl children but also of the boys, which is seldom heard just because the society doesn’t find it agreeable that a male could get raped or victimized. Under the guise of religion several crimes occur, such as the Devadasi system, still prevalent in India, where young girls are trafficked and married of to a ‘temple diety.’ They are then forced to provide sexual services to priests and the higher caste ‘devotees’ with no hopes of a real marriage. The people who consider the lower caste people as degradable doesn’t find it hesitating to have sex with their women. The women who suffer from these disgusting activities eventually forsake their name and identities just because they are no longer going to be considered as even human beings by the society.

Most of the late twentieth century works tends in the direction of feminist theorists who insist that “rape is a crime, a crime not of passion, but of abuse of power.” But still, the victims are considered to be the actual ones responsible for what has happened to them, and express it as if the victim “wanted it” or by wearing enticing clothing or by behaving in a given way, was “asking for it.” The victims don’t want it to be made an issue due to the attitude of the society around them which is going to criticize the victim for the injustice that has happened to them.

The victims who are rescued are often ostracized by the mainstream society who thinks it quite ‘unnatural’ to live in an environment where the victimized is left to live. The sex workers are treated with utmost disgust and contempt without even trying to understand their situations or how they ended up so. This social isolation is one of the main reasons that drive the victims back into the flesh trade to which once they were sold by their near and dear ones, either their family or friends.

The contemporary society has changed itself so radically that it has specialized in creating broken people every day. It takes courage to raise voices against the cruelest of the crimes, and it takes a single moment from each person’s life to bring about a change in the pitiful conditions of the victimized and to save them from the traumatized conditions. As Edwin Osgood Grover in The Book of Good Cheer: A Little Bundle of Cheery Thoughts says, “I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.”

Adithya. S, Assistant Professor of English, Al Shifa College of Arts and Science, Kizhattoor, Perinthalmanna