The chapter examines in detail the kinds of pathology victims are required to develop and how being victimized has become equivalent to having a chronic mental illness. It also attempts to show how this pathologizing begins with a reading of the victim’s body that requires longstanding suffering, thereby setting up a version of a victim that is damaging and exclusionary. Both pathology and longstanding suffering rob victims of agency, and victims become reactors rather than actors. The chapter looks at the irony as well as the difficulty of becoming a “convincing victim.” In addition, the chapter raises questions about the labels “victim” and “survivor,” about the meaning and function of the terms for victims and their implications for feminist thinking. The chapter offers a version of victim that recognizes agency as well as passivity, strength as well as vulnerability, resistance as well as dissociation. To the extent that abuse is a typical occurrence in the lives of women, a narrow and extreme prototype of victimization serves only to divide women from one another and works against a large-scale reshaping of gender relations in society which the problem ultimately requires. Notes, references