“Victims as moral beacons: victims and perpetrators in Northern Ireland” by John D. Brewer and Bernadette C. Hayes.

In this article, sociologists John D. Brewer and Bernadette C. Hayes complicate the categories of perpetrator and victim by entangling these using the notion of multiple victimhood. As an extension of this, they argue that these increasingly blurred boundaries between victims, perpetrators, and subcategories within these, serve to undermine the status of the victim as a moral beacon. The authors reference Breen Smyth (2007) and Hannah Arendt (1958) as originators of the idea of victims as moral beacons, which essentially entails that victims decide who is worthy of forgiveness within a society. The article first situates its argument in the historical context of its field, namely the increased understanding of the categories of victim and perpetrator as no longer static and binary. Secondly, it applies these blurred boundaries to post-conflict Northern Ireland, which serves as the case study for this article. Thirdly, it uses data from the 2004 Northern Ireland Life and Times survey to understand how victimhood is conceived of in Northern Ireland. Fourthly, it relates the different interpretations of victimhood to who is perceived as perpetrator in the Northern Ireland conflict. Specific attention is paid to whether those who identify as victims have a more compromising stance on determining perpetrators. The goal is to assess to what extent these victims serve as moral beacons to which other people can match their level of forgiveness. 

The authors use Brewer’s (2010) concept of multiple victimhood in their analysis, which comprises four types of victims: individual victims, silent victims, collective victims, and non-victims. Specifically the Northern Ireland context is illustrative of the complexities of multiple victimhood and its relation to perpetration, as both sides of the conflict see themselves as victims and the other as perpetrator, which greatly complicates how those who think of themselves as victims can serve as moral beacons for society at large. Through their analysis of Northern Ireland, the authors discovered that people who identified as individual victims were significantly more likely to adopt a partisan stance. For Nationalists, this meant seeing the Unionists as perpetrators, and vice versa, which undermines the moral beacon-ness of individual victims. Interestingly, silent victims and non-victims were most willing to compromise, and described the perpetrators of the Northern Ireland conflict to be either neither the Nationalists or the Unionists, but individual actors, or found both groups to be responsible. They thus have a less partisan stance, and serve as better moral beacons, if the scale is level of compassion. The authors do admit that identity patterns play a role in determining who is victim and perpetrator as well, as the Nationalists were consistently more likely to adopt a partisan stance. 

This article concludes with the important realization that the categorization of victims as a single entity is problematic, and recommends that there should be policy changes to accommodate the different types of victims and their subsequent views on perpetration. The article thus contributes to theories and approaches that focus on the increasingly blurred boundaries between victims and perpetrators. Additionally, the authors warn against using victims as moral beacons who determine the boundaries of forgiveness, and invite further reflection upon the complexities of victimhood. This article is therefore relevant to not only the field of sociology, but also to the field of law, which could investigate the aforementioned policy differences, and to academics who are conducting research on Northern Ireland specifically. 

Author of this entry: Nienke Veenstra

Brewer, John D., Bernadette C. Hayes. “Victims as moral beacons: victims and perpetrators in Northern Ireland.” Contemporary Social Science, 2011, 6.1, p. 73-88.