Has Western Society Become a Victim Culture?

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I was recently listening to an interview with Marie Kawthar Daouda, author of Not Your Victim: How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us (2026). Marie Daouda is a Lecturer in French at Oriel College, Oxford. Originally from Morocco, she studied French and English literature at La Sorbonne and at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. In the interview, she argued that there is an identity crisis in the Western World, partly due to Western Society becoming harnessed to victim culture.

You can see this argument is gaining traction everywhere. A student demands trigger warnings for a classic novel. A social media influencer turns a personal setback into a 12-part saga of oppression. A commentator laments that we have moved from a society of resilience to a society of fragility. Jeremy Clarkson recently criticised what he called “snowflake” staff on BBC's The Repair Shop, after a planned segment featuring legendary comedian Bob Monkhouse was quietly dropped. The segment focused on Monkhouse’s handwritten joke books, some dating back to the 1960s. They were brought to the show’s barn for restoration, but never made it to air after concerns were raised about parts of the material. According to reports, at least one member of the production team objected to certain jokes, leading to what sources described as a “collective decision” to scrap the feature altogether. The notebooks were returned to Monkhouse’s family without filming being completed. It is a classic example of 'presentism': criticising the past's culture through the lens of modern-day attitudes, values, and experiences.

The most systematic sociological treatment of the question, "Has Western Society Become a Victim Culture?" comes from the American sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. In their 2018 book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, they argue that Western societies have passed through three distinct moral regimes. The first was an honour culture, typical of agrarian and warrior societies, where personal reputation was defended by direct retaliation. Insults were met with duels. At a national level, while not always cited as the primary driver in traditional history books, honour (defined as status, reputation, wounded pride, or revenge) is a major, and perhaps the dominant, cause of many wars. Some research suggests that when including the need to avenge humiliation, honour-related motives outweigh material or security interests.

The second moral regime was a dignity culture, which emerged with the Enlightenment and liberal individualism. In this model, people internalised their self-worth and appealed to universal laws and norms when wronged, rather than taking personal revenge. Campbell and Manning contend that we are now entering a third phase: 'victimhood culture'. Here, moral status is increasingly derived from being, or appearing to be, harmed. The key mechanism is not physical retaliation or legal appeal, but the public claim of victimhood, amplified by bureaucratic complaint systems and social media platforms that reward visible suffering with attention and moral capital. They are not saying that no genuine harms exist. They are observing that the incentive structure has shifted towards performing victimisation.

If Campbell and Manning are correct, three structural changes have driven this shift. The first is the bureaucratisation of grievance. Universities, workplaces, and online platforms now have formal complaints procedures, diversity and inclusion offices, and content moderation systems. These mechanisms encourage the formal articulation of harm. They are, in principle, progressive. But they also incentivise a particular kind of self-presentation, one where the claimant must demonstrate injury. The second engine is social media. Platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram reward emotional intensity and moral outrage with engagement. A nuanced, balanced account of a complex situation rarely goes viral. A stark, emotionally charged narrative of victimisation often does. As Erving Goffman, a Canadian-born American social psychologist and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century", showed decades ago in his work on stigma management, individuals strategically present their identities in social interactions. Social media has simply supercharged this process, turning suffering into a form of what Goffman called 'impression management'.

The third engine is the therapeutic culture that has deepened since the late twentieth century. Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Therapy Culture (2004), has long argued that the therapeutic ethos has infantilised society. The therapeutic framework, for all its benefits in destigmatising mental health, can also encourage an identity organised around trauma. He makes a related argument from a civil liberties perspective, contending that the therapeutic culture has weakened resilience and diminished the capacity for robust democratic debate.

There are sociologists and critical theorists who push back hard on the "victim society" argument. They believe that what looks like a new culture of grievance is actually historically marginalised groups finally gaining the language and platform to articulate harms that always existed but were routinely ignored. From this perspective, the problem is not that people claim victimhood too readily. It is that the powerful have, for centuries, dismissed legitimate grievances as 'whining'. Naming structural racism, sexism, or homophobia is not victimhood culture. It is an accurate description. Nancy Fraser, an American philosopher, critical theorist and feminist, suggests that claiming harm is a legitimate form of political participation for groups excluded from formal power. When a woman names workplace harassment, or a person of colour names racial profiling, they are not performing fragility. They are exercising democratic voice. She argues that even the concepts of microaggressions and trigger warnings, for all their excesses, emerged from genuine attempts to protect vulnerable people from real harm.

The anthropological position is, inevitably, that both positions have some verity, though the balance may well have become distorted. There have been genuine expansions in moral awareness. We do take harm more seriously than previous generations did, and that is largely a good thing. But there are also real incentive structures that can reward grievance performance, particularly in online spaces and bureaucratic systems where visible suffering confers status, and I have seen this first-hand in the universities I have worked at. The difficult question is not whether victimhood culture exists. The question is where to draw the line between legitimate recognition of harm and performative victimhood. That line is genuinely contested, and it cannot be drawn by political science, social science or anthropology. It requires thoughtful and honest judgment of each member of society.

Perhaps the most useful concept for navigating this debate is moral capital. Just as economic capital can be accumulated, invested, and spent, so too can moral status. In a victimhood culture, claiming harm becomes a way of accumulating moral capital. This does not mean that all claims are false. It means that the social context shapes how claims are made, received, and rewarded. The challenge is to hold both truths at once: to take real harm seriously, while resisting the incentives that reward the performance of suffering. That is harder than picking a side, but

I believe it is the most honest place to stand.