Gone but not forgotten

A story on BBC News highlights the perverse modern cult of the victim.

It's a report on a new 60-volume book, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which profiles 55,000 people who have changed our lives in Britain but are now dead. The BBC picks out five as examples: Stephen Lawrence, Jill Dando, Robert Maxwell, Jamie Bulger, and Philip Lawrence.

Four of them make it for one reason only - they were murdered. Jill Dando, it is true, was a well-known TV presenter, but looking quite nice on travel programmes and Crimewatch hardly qualifies as making a significant impact. Being murdered in cold blood on your doorstep shouldn't, either, but this illustrates just what an impact being a victim makes upon the national psyche today. In a society that seems out of control, the innocent victim is the embodiment of our helplessness and is also morally pure.

The thing about dead victims is that they are not around to ruin their saintly image with their human reality, nor to complain about what is done in their name. So the murder of Stephen Lawrence, probably by a group of racist thugs, has been used to reorganise police and public services around the assumption that everyone is racist, even if their intentions are otherwise. Jamie Bulger's death helped establish the notion that children are always at risk, intensifying parental paranoia - and also that kids are dangerous, and can even be tried for murder at the age of 10.

Meanwhile, the actions of the living are inevitably seen as corrupt and self-serving. Yet the dead change nothing. Only in life can we really change the world for the better.

The deaths that changed our lives, BBC News, 23 September 2004