Alice Hasters | Anti Opfer: Warum wir Ver­letz­lich­keit ver­ach­ten

“If victims didn’t complain so much, we’d have fewer problems” – this is the sort of stance taken on social media and in the media, observes Alice Hasters. The author and podcaster points out: People are talking about victims wherever you look. But increasingly, this doesn’t refer to people who have suffered injustice. Instead, it means people who are disrupting harmony, who are seen as soft, who drag other people down or who want to put themselves in front of others. Being tough on other people is increasingly seen as a desirable trait – and while victims are held to inhumanly high standards, powerful alliances of patriarchal complicity are changing our world for the worse.

In “Anti Victim: Why We Look Down on Vulnerability”, Alice Hasters describes a cultural shift, the rise of which is hardly coincidental given the resurgence of authoritarianism and fascism. What happens to a society where sensitivity is seen as elitist? Through intellectual rigour, Hasters confronts the spread of this new harshness with the political power of solidarity. At the Reeperbahn Festival, she’ll talk about victim blaming, the complexity of being a victim and social coexistence with author and moderator Nefeli Kavouras.