From Victims to Heroes

Public Characters ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190050047.003.0010 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 213-231

Author(s):

James M. Jasper ◽

Michael P. Young ◽

Elke Zuern

Keyword(s):

Sexual Abuse ◽

Child Sexual Abuse ◽

Guerrilla Warfare

This chapter looks at an important transformation, when victims manage to become heroes, addressing several ways that groups can jump the boundary from victim to hero. It discusses the intentional suffering of martyrs and saints. They are heroes by example, as their pointed sacrifice becomes a form of power for those who have no other. The chapter also looks at heroes of endurance and resistance. Their resistance, by surviving rather than dying, counters the traditional expectations of passivity and weakness from sufferers. It discusses the gendered dimensions of this heroism. In the transformation from victims to heroes, oppressed and injured groups face an essential dilemma: They need the sympathy that victimhood brings but also the strength to fight back. The chapter draws on a range of examples of attempts to solve this tension: including the Palestinian concept of sumud, guerrilla warfare, and survivors of child sexual abuse.

Download Full-text

Malpractice & Negligence: State Supreme Courts Limit Therapists’ Duties to Third Parties

The Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics ◽

10.1017/s1073110500012985 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 204-205

Author(s):

Megan Cleary

Keyword(s):

Sexual Abuse ◽

Child Sexual Abuse ◽

Supreme Court ◽

New Hampshire ◽

Third Parties ◽

State Supreme Courts ◽

Recovered Memories ◽

Supreme Courts ◽

Repressed Memory ◽

University Of Colorado

In recent years, the law in the area of recovered memories in child sexual abuse cases has developed rapidly. See J.K. Murray, “Repression, Memory & Suggestibility: A Call for Limitations on the Admissibility of Repressed Memory Testimony in Abuse Trials,” University of Colorado Law Review, 66 (1995): 477-522, at 479. Three cases have defined the scope of liability to third parties. The cases, decided within six months of each other, all involved lawsuits by third parties against therapists, based on treatment in which the patients recovered memories of sexual abuse. The New Hampshire Supreme Court, in Hungerford v. Jones, 722 A.2d 478 (N.H. 1998), allowed such a claim to survive, while the supreme courts in Iowa, in J.A.H. v. Wadle & Associates, 589 N.W.2d 256 (Iowa 1999), and California, in Eear v. Sills, 82 Cal. Rptr. 281 (1991), rejected lawsuits brought by nonpatients for professional liability.

Download Full-text