Is ‘victim-survivor’ our imperfect alternative to describing people with lived experience of sexual violence? A feminist symbolic interactionist analysis, considering how ethnicity, gender, and disability interact with language choice

Feminist violence and abuse literature is caught in the grips of a debate surrounding the most appropriate language to describe people with lived experiences of sexual violence. This article offers a theoretical tracing of the history of the normative framings of “victim” and “survivor,” and the emerging alternative “victim-survivor,” through a symbolic interactionist lens. Given that both “victim” and “survivor” labels hold distinct disadvantages in isolation, particularly among the survivor discourse for ethnic minority and disabled and male victim/survivors, “victim-survivor” offers an alternative, in a similar fashion to LGBTQ+, affording flexibility for victim/survivors to occupy a multi-dimensional form of identity.