ABSTRACT
In Northern Ireland, as 'Heather' articulates below, "everyone's a victim of somebody else". The famed criminologist Nils Christie refers to 'ideal victims' as those bodies best able to encapsulate socially constructed and learned ideals of purity and blamelessness. Thus the hierarchy of victims may be much more complex than it seems at face value. The acute reader may notice how both 'Michael Jackson' and 'Benjamin' take special care to emphasise that, in their perspective, the category of innocence could apply to Catholic-nationalist victims as well. The opposite of empathic unsettlement might be what Bertolt Brecht famously called 'crude' empathy, or the gratuitous stimulation of empathy through an over-identification or outright assimilation into the traumatised body. The chapter concludes with the case of 'Jack', whose testimony perhaps comes closest to illustrating what the prosocial impact of creating the space for dissonance and unsettlement may be.
