The victim is always right

Some time ago, even before Ireland began to become what we call a "multicultural society", a reader wrote to me describing his experience of being assaulted by a female colleague at work. The woman was black, my correspondent white, adult and male. The attack was unprovoked. He believes he was attacked because of his sex and colour. He told his colleagues, who urged him to be more sympathetic to his attacker on account of her history as a black female. He reported the matter to his boss, who advised him that women were highly strung and liable to be unpredictable and it was best to stay away from his assailant in the interests of peace. My correspondent observed that this implied that by being in proximity to his attacker he was somehow guilty of provoking her. This logic fell on deaf ears. He made a report to the Garda, who said they would speak to the woman. As a matter of protocol, he informed his boss and before long everybody in the place knew what was going to happen. But it didn't. The gardaí never came.

It dawned on my correspondent that the only way to counteract the persisting presumption of guilt would be to have the attack defined as sexist, racist or both, but he was perceptive enough to know this would be an unproductive route for a man to take. It retrospectively occurred to him that when his colleagues asked him to take into account what this woman had been through in her life, by virtue of being female and black, they were implicitly acknowledging that the attack had indeed been sexist or racist, and most likely both. But when he suggested this to them directly, they told him it was an absurd notion.

Most of his colleagues are female. He believed they were afraid that, if the truth of his experience were to be acknowledged, this would represent a threat to the gains feminism has made for the status of women. "I get this very strange feeling," he wrote, "that my colleagues think I am trying to play a trick, that it is all a clever ploy on my part to turn back the clock. In seeing me as purely clever, they have failed to notice that I feel so demeaned and so very hurt and that I am ferociously angry." Better watch that, I warned him: in the new dispensation, anger is proof of guilt.

My correspondent wrote that his situation seems to him a prophecy – and he was right about this. He described the future: a society in which we will have dispensed with morality, justice and equality and replaced them with the Law of the Omnipotent Victim. We might call it the post-Kafka condition.

In his novel The Trial, which made his name a synonym for something we lacked words for before, Franz Kafka made visible the phenomenon of absolute and arbitrary power exercised anonymously. That, perhaps, was the great tyranny of the age just past. In the age about to unfold, the greatest tyranny will be the spectre of absolute power in the hands of the apparently defenceless victim. We stand on the threshold of an era when, by virtue of being black, female or the proven sufferer of abuse or deprivation, the Omnipotent Victim will be set beyond justice, morality, fairness and the law, and anyone she accuses will be automatically convicted. In this future, if you come into conflict with someone whom our various ideologies designate a victim, by virtue of sex, race or origin, you had better have your affairs in order in advance of the hearing. Victims are never guilty of anything and those they accuse never innocent. This is why Travellers seek to be redefined as an ethnic minority, for that status would give them immunity from any remaining expectations of society that they behave as other citizens are obliged to.