Who Has the Right to Be a Victim?
- Jul 24
- 6 min read
Claire Silverstone-Bright is an author, speaker and criminology researcher whose work connects lived experience with public education. She is the author of A Life Lived Chronically: Memoir of a DES Daughter and writes on DES, justice and rehabilitation.
Who has the right to know they have been harmed? Who has the authority to recognise someone as a victim? Who has the right to speak for a community? When medicine, advocacy, the law, and society each tell a different story, which version do we believe?
At first glance, these questions appear unrelated. One belongs in a hospital, another in a courtroom, another in Parliament, and another in the public square. Yet, over the past few years, I have found myself asking each of them in turn. What began as a deeply personal journey as a DES daughter slowly became something much larger. I realised I had been asking the same question in very different places, not simply, “What happened?” but, “Who has the authority to recognise what happened?”
The recent parliamentary debate on diethylstilbestrol, better known as DES, brought that question into sharper focus than ever before.
For those unfamiliar with DES, it was a drug prescribed to millions of pregnant women around the world in the belief that it would help sustain healthy pregnancies. Years later, it became clear that its consequences extended far beyond the women who took it. Many of their daughters experienced structural abnormalities, increased health risks, and, for some, rare cancers. A medical decision made during one generation became the lived experience of the next.
To hear DES discussed in the House of Commons, therefore, mattered profoundly. After decades in which so many affected families felt overlooked, the condition had finally entered the parliamentary record. Recognition had begun.
Yet, as I listened, another thought quietly emerged: recognition is never as simple as it first appears.
Recognition is one of the most underestimated forms of power. Before research can be funded, policy can change, treatment pathways can be developed, or compensation can be considered, someone must first acknowledge that there is something worthy of recognition. Until that moment, suffering can remain intensely personal while remaining largely invisible to everyone else.
The more I reflected, the more I realised that every institution recognises harm differently. Medicine, advocacy, the law, and society each answer a different question. None of those answers is complete on its own. Together, however, they reveal something important about how we understand victimhood itself.
The first question belongs to medicine.
Who has the right to know they have been harmed?
As a DES daughter, I have often reflected on the curious relationship between my mother’s medical records and my own health. The prescription sits within her notes. The consequences reside within my body.
That simple reality raises questions that modern medicine will increasingly encounter as our understanding of genetics, inherited conditions, and environmental exposure continues to develop. Medical confidentiality remains one of the cornerstones of ethical healthcare, as it should. But inherited risk asks us to consider where one person’s medical story ends and another’s begins.
If my understanding of my own health depends upon information recorded before I was born, do I have a moral interest in that information? At what point does my mother’s medical history become part of my own clinical future?
DES does not provide easy answers. It does, however, force us to ask better questions.
Medicine does far more than diagnose disease. It acknowledges experience. A diagnosis tells us not only what may be happening physically, but also that our concerns have been heard, investigated, and taken seriously. It opens the door to research, treatment, and understanding.
Recognition in medicine is often the first step towards healing.
The second question belongs to advocacy.
Who has the right to speak once harm has been recognised?
The parliamentary debate reminded me why advocacy matters. Without people willing to share painful experiences, organise communities, and persist when institutions appear slow to respond, many important issues would never reach public attention. Campaigns create visibility where invisibility once existed. They transform private suffering into public awareness.
That contribution deserves recognition. Yet recognition also carries responsibility.
Governments cannot consult every individual. Researchers cannot interview every patient. Journalists cannot tell every story. They naturally look towards organisations and recognised voices to help them understand a community. That is both necessary and practical.
But recognition and representation are not quite the same thing.
Communities are rarely uniform. They include people whose experiences differ, whose priorities vary, and whose voices are expressed in different ways. Some become campaigners. Others contribute quietly through research, education, or professional practice. Many never join an organisation at all. Their experiences remain no less authentic simply because they have chosen a different path.
No organisation owns a condition, and no individual owns lived experience.
The strength of advocacy lies not in becoming the only recognised voice, but in remaining open to voices beyond its own. Recognition should widen the conversation, not narrow it.
That principle extends well beyond patient advocacy. It applies wherever institutions seek to understand communities through those who speak on their behalf.
The third question belongs to the justice system.
Who decides which harms become part of the official story?
We often imagine courts as places where truth is discovered. In reality, they perform a more precise and limited task. They apply legal definitions to human experience through evidence, procedure, and the rule of law. They determine legal responsibility. They cannot capture every consequence of every event, nor are they intended to. That distinction matters.
Every criminal case involves choices. Charges are selected, while others are not. Evidence is admitted or excluded. Some matters proceed to trial, while others conclude through negotiated outcomes. These are not signs of failure. They are an inevitable part of a justice system that must balance fairness, proportionality, and the public interest.
Yet those decisions also shape the official narrative. The legal story is not always the whole story.
For victims, lived experience is often richer, more complicated, and more enduring than the legal language eventually used to describe it. Equally, the absence of a prosecution or conviction does not necessarily mean that no harm has been experienced. It may simply reflect the thresholds on which every justice system depends.
Legal recognition carries immense authority. It is public, formal, and rigorous. It is also one form of recognition among several.
The fourth question belongs not to any institution, but to all of us.
Who do we choose to believe?
Not every victim receives a diagnosis, joins a campaign, or enters a courtroom. Many people experience recognition, or its absence, through the everyday judgements of society itself.
Today, those judgements are increasingly influenced by technology. Search engines shape first impressions. Social media amplifies some stories, while others disappear beneath an endless stream of content. Journalists decide which voices become headlines. Communities decide which experiences fit their understanding of victimhood and which remain difficult to hear.
Recognition no longer belongs solely to institutions. It belongs, in part, to each of us.
Every time we repeat a headline without reading beyond it, dismiss an experience because it does not resemble our own, or assume that the most visible story is the complete story, we participate in deciding whose suffering is recognised and whose quietly fades from view.
The internet has made recognition astonishingly powerful. It can connect people who once believed they were alone. It can expose injustice, accelerate research, and build communities across continents. Yet it can also simplify complexity, rewarding certainty over curiosity and visibility over nuance.
The loudest story is not always the only story. The most visible victim is not always the only victim. The recognised voice is not always the only voice worth hearing.
Watching Parliament debate DES, I felt something that many families have waited decades to experience: recognition. For that, I am profoundly grateful.
My hope is that this moment marks not the end of a conversation, but its beginning. I hope that recognition continues to expand, that research reaches every family still searching for answers, that healthcare continues to listen, that advocacy continues to welcome diverse voices, that justice remains conscious of the stories it cannot fully tell, and that, as a society, we become a little slower to assume we have already heard every perspective.
Justice does not begin when a remedy is offered. It begins when someone says, “I see what happened. Your experience matters. You are not invisible.”
Read more from Claire R. Silverstone-Bright
Claire R. Silverstone-Bright, Author, Expert by Experience and Criminologist
Claire Silverstone-Bright is an author, speaker and criminology researcher working at the intersection of hidden medical harm, justice and rehabilitation. Her memoir, A Life Lived Chronically: Memoir of a DES Daughter, explores the lifelong impact of DES exposure and the wider consequences of being medically harmed, misunderstood and unheard. Through her writing, public speaking and research, Claire examines how identity can be rebuilt after adversity. Her mission is to transform lived experience into public education, compassion and meaningful change.
