ABSTRACT
Second victims are practitioners who are involved in an incident that kills or injures someone else and for which they feel personally responsible. The incident does not in fact have to kill or injure anyone-the strong possibility is often enough to engender symptoms of second victimhood. Interestingly, almost all research on the symptoms and suffering of second victims comes from healthcare. Yet almost all practical ways of dealing meaningfully and compassionately with second victims do not come from
healthcare. These come from emergency services, from air traffic control, from firefighters and police forces, from the military. Yet healthcare has both coined (Wu 2000) and appropriated the very label-for example:
We will soon turn to second victims in fields other than healthcare, but first a few reflections on the very name. The label of “second victim” could be a bit problematic. It seems to introduce a ranking: The depth of the victim’s predicament depends on the number assigned to it. Rankings of moral emotions and traumatic experiences are impossible because they are unique and valid to the person experiencing them. This would be even more so if we called them “secondary” victims, as that means “coming after, less important than.” What makes sense, though, is that “secondary” results from something else that is primary. Yet “second” also presupposes a first victim, without whom no second victim would be created at all. The label draws attention to the fact that the psychological, emotional, and organizational fallout of failure does not stop with the first, immediately affected victims, even though it raises the question of whether there are third and fourth victims.
