Rethinking victimhood: From ideal types to narrative legitimacy

This article reconsiders Nils Christie's notion of the ideal victim by shifting attention from fixed typologies to the narrative processes through which legitimacy is constructed. Although Christie emphasized the cultural contingency of victimhood, contemporary debates often treat the ‘ideal victim’ as a static category. Drawing on narrative victimology and youth victimization research, this article argues that victimhood is not a binary status but a relational, interpretive, and morally negotiated position shaped by competing structural understandings of victimhood. Young people are a crucial site for examining this shift, as they navigate competing and opposing moral frameworks when positioning themselves as victims. Through a narrative literature synthesis, the article develops a conceptual continuum of structural understandings of victimhood, ranging from a resilience-oriented orientation to a recognition-oriented logic. Most youth narratives occupy a hybrid space between these poles, blending personal responsibility with demands for validation, fairness, and social understanding. The proposed continuum functions as a heuristic rather than a classificatory model, providing a flexible tool for examining how legitimacy is claimed, negotiated, and contested in stories of harm. By foregrounding narrative meaning-making, it illuminates the plurality of contemporary victim positions and calls for renewed attention to the moral, cultural, and institutional conditions that shape recognition in accounts of youth victimization. • Proposes a narrative continuum for understanding youth victimhood. • Reinterprets Christie's ideal victim through narrative victimology. • Identifies competing resilience- and recognition-oriented structural understandings of victimhood. • Shows how young people negotiate legitimacy in stories of harm. • Offers a flexible heuristic for studying modern victim positioning.