Abstract
This special issue examines victim recognition in the case of serious human rights violations. Starting from how victimology has addressed the issue of victim recognition, it analyses the importance for victims of recognition and recognitive attitudes in contexts of political crimes and transitional justice. The papers presented in this special issue take on a multidisciplinary approach to highlight the importance of different types of recognition for healing victims and their relationships with others. They illustrate how recognition can be felt cumulatively and obtained by victims through the responses of different actors across various social spaces. They also indicate that victim recognition in the legal sphere is fraught with obstacles and that victims facing the absence of legal recognition may find some satisfaction through non-judicial and informal measures of justice, interpersonal and community interactions and psychosocial support. Two papers address the issue of victim recognition as a central part of a deep societal transformation towards healing intergroup relationships and reconciliation in the case of historical injustices and structural victimisation in Canada. Two other papers address particularly State recognition: one focuses on individual and collective reparations for victims of forced displacement in the contexts of Argentina and Iraq; the other discusses the struggles faced by victims of sexual and gender-based violence seeking for legal recognition in Guatemala and Belgium. Recognition of victims in Colombia through people’s engagement with art as symbolic reparations is the focus of another paper. Finally, two other papers concern victims’ struggles in claiming for recognition in the contexts of Perú and Ecuador, analysing respectively how recognition can be experienced and furthered through group mobilisation and group support. Taken together, these different papers constitute an innovative attempt to apply the concept and the intricacies of victim recognition to the context of political crimes and transitional justice.
Victimologists have long stressed the significance of recognition for victims of crime, that is, mostly ‘common crimes’. While serious human rights violations are very different from common crimes for lawyers and criminologists, for victimologists, they may not be all that different. Victimisation is widely understood as a relative and socially constructed experience (Spencer and Walklate, 2016). Ikäheimo and Laitinen (2007) refer to this as identification, which they further breakdown into external identification (attribution by another) and self-identification (self-attribution) of victimhood/victim identity. Once an individual or group identifies their experience as victimisation (i.e. labelling an incident as a victimisation), they seek recognition from others. For this recognition to be meaningful for victims, it should not only validate their experiences but also vindicate victims, that is, acknowledge that the harm they suffered was undeserved and caused by someone else’s actions. This reflects what Ikäheimo and Laitinen (2007) refer to as acknowledgement: recognising the validity of something, such as norms, principles, rules, claims, values, reasons; here, the validity of a victim’s rights, claims and experiences of harm. Recognition has a moral significance as a central condition for an individual’s dignity and identity formation, as well as a person’s sense of belonging in the social sphere (Taylor, 1992). Moreover, it also has political significance because it expresses recognitive relationships of respect, love, concern, esteem or value from individuals and institutions (Honneth, 1995). These recognitive attitudes, as pointed out by Ikäheimo and Laitinen (2007), matter to victims in social encounters; they are key to ascertaining and affirming their individual and group identity, rights and value within society.
The recognition of victims by ‘others’ can include different actors: (1) the offender(s), (2) society and (3) the State. Recognition by the offender or harm-doer consists of an acknowledgement of guilt or wrongdoing. The perpetrator’s acknowledgement of mistakes and harm done is important for victims as it helps them makes sense of the harm suffered and alleviates feelings of guilt and shame they often experience in the aftermath of victimisation.
Recognition by society can imply various civil society-initiated measures, which aim at increasing the social visibility of victims and validating their experiences, raising public awareness and promoting social dialogue, as well as reintegrating them in the political and social community. These measures can take many forms including initiatives of civil society support and advocacy and community-based symbolic reparations (e.g. artistic practices, memorialisation initiatives). Acts of social recognition also encompass forms of support victims may receive from family and friends and wider social circles: acquaintances, neighbours, colleagues, local authorities and churches (van der Velden et al., 2019). They can help victims restore a sense of connection with society (Herman, 2005) and contribute to the psychosocial recovery of victims (Hamber, 2009).
Recognition by the State includes public acknowledgments by State actors, as well as actions by public institutions such as the criminal justice system and state compensation programmes. From a societal perspective, it demonstrates a commitment from the part of the State to uphold fundamental values and deal with an unjust past (Govier, 2006). Regardless of whether the State is responsible for victims’ suffering, it has an obligation to help victims rebuild their lives by providing them access to resources, ensuring their safety and respecting their rights. This recognition opens the door to important normative implications in terms of rights and state responsibilities. In so far as they suffer a violation of their rights which is recognised by the State, they have the right to recognition and can be incorporated as subjects into the regime of rights afforded to victims. Recognition by the State includes how victims are defined in national legal frameworks, as well as how state institutions recognise victims in their practices and the implementation of the law (effective recognition through mechanisms of justice such as criminal prosecution or state compensation). These recognitive attitudes are of particular moral and political relevance for victims. They help restore victims’ dignity and reintegrate them by honouring their status and ensuring that victims see their rights realised.
These different meanings of recognition (identification, acknowledgement, recognitive attitudes, validation, vindication) reveal how the realisation of victims’ rights depends on different levels and relational spaces of recognition, which build up on each other (Goodey, 2005). The victim may self-identify with an experience of harm as constituting a victimisation which amounts to a violation that can be reported to a judicial authority as such. Or a person may be identified as a victim of a violation by someone and directed towards an authority to file a report. This may move on to acknowledgement when the reported violation is recorded by an official authority as valid. This could also encompass some form of acceptance that the harm done to the victim was not deserved and that the claims put forward are legitimate. This may then lead to the initiation of an investigation and, depending on the case, a prosecution, the granting of reparations and providing other forms of redress to victims, which all imply recognitive attitudes. Throughout their trajectory in the criminal justice process, victims can be granted recognition through various formal practices and procedures. Wilke (2007: 482) reminds us that ‘legal norms are enabling, suggestive or prohibitive of different modes of intersubjective recognition’. In other words, recognition is generated through the interaction between legal norms and intersubjective relationships between those who seek recognition and those with the power/desire to grant it. In encounters with criminal justice actors, recognitive attitudes can take various meaningful forms for victims, such as being granted victim status, being heard, seeing the violation they reported lead to a decision to prosecute and participating in obtaining informational or psychosocial assistance or reparation (Cario and Ruiz-Vera, 2015; Doak, 2008).
The context of political crimes and transitional justice
Victim recognition is equally of prime importance in the context of political violence, serious human rights violations and international crimes. As a result, it is a frequently highlighted theme in the transitional justice (TJ) discourse, where it is presented as central to victims in terms of healing and of addressing the harms they have suffered. While the importance of recognition for victims is well known and widely used in scholarship, victims may use the word in many ways that may mean different things to different people (De Greiff, 2012). For example, victim recognition has been (1) contrasted to denial (Cohen, 200195); (2) considered a prerequisite for healing (Danieli, 2014); (3) presented as a form of justice (Haldemann, 2008) and in particular (4) presented as a form of TJ (De Greiff, 2012). De Greiff (2012) further distinguishes between the need for victims to be recognised as having been harmed and wronged (moral recognition) and the need for victims to be recognised as legal rights holders and relevant political actors in virtue of their rights’ violation (political recognition). The latter component relates to the status of ‘recognised victims’, which aims to restore their dignity and to contribute to their political (re-)integration into the society and is therefore tied to measures of redress.
It should be noted that, in the context of political violence and TJ, the issue of victim recognition entails a number of particular challenges (Parmentier and Weitekamp, 2007). Many violations take place in a political context and involve a multitude of actors that are inspired by ideologies, of a political or religious nature. Moreover, political violence frequently produces a large number of victims, even mass victimisation. TJ mechanisms of truth, reparation or judicial accountability can contribute to victim recognition. They can validate the harm suffered by victims, as well as restore their dignity (Gutmann and Thompson, 2000), by vindicating them (acknowledging the wrongdoing by someone else) and by effectively addressing the violation’s impacts (Rauschenbach and Jones, 2026). TJ scholarship highlights that acknowledgement is more likely to be experienced when mechanisms meaningfully reflect and put into effect social solidarity and the restoration of victims’ dignity (Correa et al., 2020).
Recognition from ‘others’ can include different actors, in the context of political crimes and TJ: (1) the perpetrator or members of the perpetrator group, (2) society and (3) the State. In the case of political violence, where the offender is the State or its representative, these two concepts overlap. Recognition by perpetrators can involve various accountability practices, including serving a sentence following criminal prosecution and conviction, as well as gestures of apology, truth-telling and reparation. Research has however shown that in the aftermath of mass atrocity, victims are often met with silence, denial or justification by perpetrators (Bilali and Vollhardt, 2019).
In the context of TJ, recognition by society may include initiatives of civil society support and advocacy, psychosocial interventions carried out by organisations and NGOs and community-based symbolic reparations (artistic and cultural practices, (re)burials, exhumations, memorialisation practices). For recognitive practices to be meaningful for victims, it is widely accepted that responses should go beyond the production of public knowledge of specific acts of victimisation. Responsibility for the harm and the violations experienced needs to be acknowledged, which implies that knowledge should be expressed publicly (Govier, 2006). This validates publicly the legitimacy of victims’ struggles and helps also alleviate their stigmatisation within their communities.
Recognition by the State includes public acknowledgement by State actors, as well as actions by public institutions such as the criminal justice system and State compensation programmes. Appropriate and victim-sensitive measures of redress can name, officially mark and integrate harms and responsibilities attached to these within public consciousness. When they are perceived as victim-centred, well-grounded and inclusive, reparation measures such as memorialisation initiatives and official apologies can provide such recognitive responses.
In the aftermath of mass victimisation, a key, yet obstacle-ridden stage concerns recognising victims’ rights and the obligations of States to uphold these rights. Also here, legal norms can be considered as modes of intersubjective recognition. Yet, victim recognition in the legal sphere is rarely automatic but is most often born from the relentless struggles and mobilisation of victims themselves and human rights movements (e.g. by the families of the disappeared). If recognition is important for victims to begin to heal (Strobl, 2010), there are manifold scholarly accounts of how a lack of recognition compels victims’ struggles to secure their rights in the legal and public domain. These struggles have been described diversely as aiming to overcome denial, to fight impunity and claim justice, to have voice and to obtain a political space of recognition and acknowledgement of wrongdoing by perpetrators and those who helped them.
In the context of political violence and TJ, it is emphasised that without recognition, victims can suffer ‘an additional injustice of misrecognition’ (Haldemann, 2008: 693) when they face denial, silence, repression or stigmatisation from perpetrators, official institutions and their community. The absence of recognition is revictimizing, in the sense that it can be considered a ‘second wound of silence’ (Govier, 2006: 90), which renders victims socially invisible. These different translations of misrecognition generate additional harm for victims in that they deny them the recognition of rights and can amplify further violations and oppression. In contexts of impunity, misrecognition in the form of denial, state silence or the criminalisation of marginalised groups can be institutionalised, politically endorsed and backed by legal frameworks, such as amnesty laws. Entrenched forms of misrecognition and their devastating impacts on victims have been highlighted in many contexts of impunity and state repression. They are highly disempowering for victims, as they provide the institutional legitimacy to their structural exclusion and devaluation in the social and political sphere.
State institutions and their bureaucratic practices can also contribute to misrecognition, through actions or omissions that anonymise and de-individuate victims (Rauschenbach and Jones, 2026). Margalit (1996: 220) refers to this form of misrecognition as ‘when the only identity traits recognised by the society’s institutions for an individual or a group are the numerical tags’. These issues also resonate with procedural justice perspectives, highlighting the victims’ experiences of re-victimisation due to unsupportive and disrespectful encounters and treatment in the criminal justice procedures and institutions (Jones et al., 2023).
From a victim-centred perspective, it is important to recognise that the different forms and relational spaces of recognition discussed here are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. This is particularly pertinent in the context of political crimes and TJ. When subjected to injustices, widespread violence and human rights violations, the recognition of their suffering (validation) and of the undeserved character of their victimisation (vindication) is a key justice need for victims (Baldé and Wemmers, 2021; Holder and Robinson, 2021). Yet not all forms of recognition will always be available to them. While victims often want legal recognition within the criminal justice system, a particular form of State recognition, criminal prosecution is often difficult to attain in contexts of mass atrocity. Thus, for victims, a formal recognition of their rights, as enshrined within legal frameworks, does not guarantee that these rights will be effectively and meaningfully realised (Wemmers, 2012). The cumulative nature of recognition, however, means that victims may find some satisfaction despite obstacles such as the absence of legal recognition. Besides judicial proceedings, victims can also obtain recognition through non-judicial and informal measures of justice (Rauschenbach et al., 2022), as well as interpersonal and community spheres (Hoven and Scheibel, 2015; Rauschenbach et al., 2021) and psychosocial support (Lira, 2021).
Composition of the special issue
The papers presented in this special issue highlight the importance of different types of recognition for healing victims and their relationships with others. Taken together, they constitute an innovative attempt to apply the concept and the intricacies of victim recognition to the context of political crimes and TJ.
In their two papers, Melouka, Zota and Wemmers address recognition, as a central part of a deep societal transformation towards healing intergroup relationships and reconciliation in the Canadian context. They highlight the challenges faced by victimised or disadvantaged groups when seeking recognition from members of the advantaged group. The paper by Melouka et al. examines the willingness of advantaged group members to recognise the victimisation of disadvantaged groups. While advantaged group members may recognise historical victimisation, they are less willing to recognise ongoing, structural victimisation. For members of the advantaged group, recognising structural victimisation not only threatens one’s privileged position, it can also be extremely uncomfortable. The paper by Zota et al addresses this reluctance by examining if social acceptance of the advantaged group by the disadvantaged group influences the willingness of advantaged group members to acknowledge victimisation. Together, their papers explore conditions that promote recognition of victimisation among members of the advantaged group and foster reconciliation.
Symbolic reparations by civil society in Colombia constitute the focus of Fernandez Maya’s contribution. In her paper, she explores art as a means for members of the public to engage with victimised groups. Art gives visitors elements for identifying victims as persons and acknowledging their victimising experience. In this way, recognitive attitudes during aesthetic encounters not only validate the harm suffered by victims, they can also restore their dignity by vindicating them and by effectively addressing the violation’s impacts.
Hein and Gümüsbas address State recognition and forced displacement as a form of mass victimisation. Focusing on the two distinct situations of Argentina and Iraq, they illustrate the many obstacles that victims face as they seek recognition. Beyond recognition of the victimised individual, the authors stress the importance of the victims recognising their collective victimisation, which includes collective reparations. This means that reparative measures must not only recognise the individual victim and their needs but also the collective victimisation. Reparations should therefore recognise the distinct needs and conditions of victimised groups, including the structural disparities that affect their access to justice.
State recognition is also the focus of the paper by Lara Palacios and Wozniak-Cole. Focusing on victims of sexual and gender-based violence in Guatemala and Belgium, respectively, the authors highlight the stigma often experienced by victims, as well as the many challenges they face as they seek recognition by the State. Stressing the cumulative impact of recognition, they find that legal recognition in terms of a guilty verdict is not enough. Victims seek recognition throughout the whole judicial process, including how they are allowed to participate and to decide and whether they are treated with respect by justice professionals.
In their contribution, Holguin, Cavero, Corveleyn and De Haene explore the place of recognition when families of the disappeared mobilise the criminal justice system in post-conflict Perú. Groups of women demanded the recognition of the enforced disappearances of their loved ones, that is acknowledging their status as victims, as well as finding and burying the disappeared and ensuring accountability of the perpetrators. The analysis of the victims’ trajectories suggests three dynamics through which family members claim recognition, namely by including the missing family members in the intra-family process of loss, by setting up community initiatives and launching collective platforms for mutual recognition and through group activities to be acknowledged as agents of social change. This victim-centred approach identifies the women’s trajectories as reactions to their victimisation and aims to highlight the opportunities created by victims to advance in their healing process in post-conflict societies.
Finally, Donoso’s piece aims to unwrap the concepts of political trauma, recognition and reparation in the case of post-conflict Ecuador. She discusses how victims can experience group support as a recognising-reparative space from traumatic experiences. Her main objective is to demonstrate that group methodologies may become not only instrumental academic or therapeutic approaches but also positive catalysts for agency, recovery and politicising elements for victims of human rights abuses to experience recognition and reparation. This is illustrated by studying how group spaces can become liminal spaces between the individual and the social, where long-term suffering in isolation is socialised and politicised.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.