Most victims of terrorism are innocent citizens who find themselves at the wrong place and at the wrong time, randomly targeted in brutal attacks. The lives of survivors of attacks, and those of victims’ families, are irreparably damaged. Many survivors take years to recover physically from their injuries or come to terms with their losses, and many remain deeply traumatized. While states take terrorism very seriously as a security threat, they do not necessarily always ensure adequate support to victims and their families. Victims of terrorism and their families need focused and dedicated mechanisms to ensure that their rights as individuals are upheld and protected.
Published in Chapter:
Victimology of Terrorism
Nika Chitadze (International Black Sea University, Georgia)
Copyright: © 2023
|Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-5311-7.ch007
Abstract
Terrorist acts have become an integral part of modern life. Terror (lat. terror – fear, horror) is aimed at “intimidation.” It is this circumstance that defines terror as a special form of political violence, characterized by cruelty, purposefulness, and apparent effectiveness. Terror is horror, that is, an emotional state, the emergence of which terrorists achieve by carrying out certain special actions: terrorist acts. An act of terrorism is a means that brings real or potential victims to a state of horror. The totality of links terrorist-terrorist act-terror constitutes terrorism as an integral phenomenon. Terrorism is the use of violence to intimidate people. This violence is carried out in various forms: it is physical, political, social, economic, informational, etc. violence. Taking into account the degree of mass character and the degree of organization, four types of violence are distinguished: mass organized and mass spontaneous and individual spontaneous and individual organized. Each of them has its own specifics and features.