2026-04-14

The Wrong Kind of Victim

Kaisa Vaittinen

Helping systems carry an unspoken schema of who deserves help — and the people who do not fit it pay the price.

In helping work there is a concept that is rarely said out loud. Its name could be "the right kind of victim". The concept describes what someone being helped ought to look like and behave like, in order to fit the schema that a professional helper carries about the target of their work. The schema itself is not a crime. It is unavoidable. Anyone who does emotionally heavy work with other people needs some kind of inner picture of what their work serves, otherwise the meaning of the work begins to erode within a couple of years and burnout is not far away. The problem is not that the schema exists. The problem is that the schema also determines who gets access to help and who does not.

What this essay argues

Helpers carry schemas about the "right kind of victim" that decide who gets access.
Bitter, demanding, or wounded-but-not-grateful people fall outside the schema.
The schema protects the helper's identity, not the person needing help.
Naming the schema is uncomfortable but reopens access for those excluded.
Real help requires holding presence with people who do not behave gratefully.

What does the right kind of victim look like?

The right kind of victim is grateful. The right kind of victim is fragile but not bitter. They cry at the right time and in the right way, neither too controlled nor too furiously. They have clearly suffered, but not to the point where the suffering has become part of their personality in a way that makes it difficult to be in the same room with them. They want to recover, and the recovery happens within the framework and on the timeline of the professional helper's work process. They do not challenge the helper's professional competence, do not criticise the service system, do not compare their experience to other people's experience in ways that would make the situation uncomfortable. Above all: they make the experience of being a helper possible.

And what about the wrong kind?

Now imagine someone who does not fit this mould. They have, for example, suffered, but their suffering is hard to take in, because their way of describing it is too precise, too analytical, or too calm. They may be furious, but the fury is directed at the system that has tried to help, not at an outside enemy. They may be tired of explaining the same things over and over again to new professionals. They may know more about their own situation than the professional working with them, and that knowledge may feel to the working professional like a challenge rather than a resource. Or they may simply have a personality that is not particularly pleasant, and which suffering has not made more pleasant.

This person is likely to be left without help. They are not told out loud that they do not fit the mould. Instead they are described as "a challenging case", "uncooperative", "a difficult client". Multidisciplinary meetings are held about them, meetings whose minutes tell more about the writers' bewilderment than about the person being discussed. They are referred on to the next service, because the current service does not feel like "the right place" for them. And from the next service they are referred further on. At some point they stop seeking help, which is then recorded as a sign that they were not motivated.

Where does the phenomenon come from?

This dynamic has a name in psychological and social scientific literature, although it appears under several concepts. The phenomenon can be examined through Nils Christie's (1986) ideal victim concept, although Christie developed the concept originally for the analysis of how crime victims are socially recognised. Another concept is countertransference, meaning those feelings and reactions that the client's situation evokes in the professional and which can significantly shape the helping situation even when the professional does not fully recognise their influence (Heimann, 1950). A third concept relates to how schemas guide perception and interpretation (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). A fourth is the social defence system, meaning the collectively built protection of the whole work community against the anxiety that emotionally heavy work produces (Menzies Lyth, 1959).

What follows from this in practice? Among other things, the people who would most need structural help are the ones left outside it. The system tends to help those whose helping is rewarding for the professional. This is not the fault of any individual professional, nor is it corrected by training individual workers to be more empathetic. It is a matter of a collective schema that lives beneath the surface of the work community.

Why is this hard to talk about?

Maslach (1982) described, in the context of burnout, a phenomenon in which professionals begin to depersonalise their clients in order to protect themselves from emotional load, and Hochschild (1983) named the whole mode of work emotional labour. Bringing this observation into practice requires the work community to be willing to look at itself in a way that is uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable look then falls also on those who have chosen this profession because they want to do good.

In helping work, the wish to be good is a professional core value. Precisely for this reason, helping work is one of those professions in which internal criticism and self-examination are the most difficult. You can tell a banker that they are target-driven and cold, and it will not shake their professional identity. You cannot tell a helper that they select whom they help, because the existence of selection cancels out what helping work, in its own understanding, is.

The role of the outsider

This is why something is needed that does not belong to the field and that has nothing to lose in relation to how the field sees itself. Against an outsider it is possible to direct, openly, the kinds of negative talk and feelings that cannot be directed at the client. The outsider can take in this release safely, because they leave, and what is directed at them does not have to stay alive in the permanent relationships of the work community.

The Emergent Reality intervention has been built for exactly this need. It brings an outsider into the room intentionally and in a bounded way, so that the work community can work on the pain points that are not workable internally, without the painful material having to be directed at the person being helped.

The purpose of this text is not to point a finger at individual helpers or individual organisations. Every field that does emotional work carries this same weight in some form. The purpose is to say out loud something that is known on the ground but is not usually written down, and then to leave it for the reader to work with.

Sources and background reading

Victim credibility and recognition

Christie, N. (1986). The ideal victim. In E. A. Fattah (Ed.), From Crime Policy to Victim Policy (pp. 17–30). Palgrave Macmillan.

Countertransference and emotional labour

Heimann, P. (1950). On counter-transference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 31, 81–84.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.

Schemas and social cognition

Fiske, S. T. & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social Cognition (2nd ed.).

Social defence systems and burnout in helping work

Menzies Lyth, I. (1959). The functions of social systems as a defence against anxiety. Human Relations, 13(2), 95–121.
Maslach, C. (1982). Burnout: The Cost of Caring.