Concept in Definition ABC

When a person has suffered serious damage as a result of some catastrophe natural or some accident, is said to be a victim, that is, someone who has suffered significant damage. The term is normally used in the plural, as disasters affect a significant number of people.

What rule Generally, the victims are cared for in their basic needs by the public powers until their situation is definitively restored. The causes that originate this type of situation are diverse: floods, earthquakes, large fires, landslides, hurricanes, etc.

Among the palliative measures that are adopted to help the victims we can mention subsidies, emergency bonds or bank loans under special conditions

In any case, after a catastrophe that affects a community, it is necessary to adopt urgent and exceptional measures so that the affected people can return to their normal lives as soon as possible possible. The usual procedure to deal with a catastrophe is usually the following: a calculation on the damage caused and a count of the people affected is carried out.

It is not exceptional that some groups of victims find themselves in a situation of helplessness, since the authorities do not always provide a quick response and effective to your needs.

The individual victim

This term is sometimes used to refer to a single individual who has been harmed to some extent. In this sense, in legal terminology there is the figure of the individual victim. Thus, any individual who is a victim of a crime and considers himself particularly offended, can bring a legal action in quality individual victim. In the event that his claim is accepted, he may request the payment of some type of compensation.

The origin and identifying synonyms

Damnificado comes from Latin, specifically from the word damnun which means damage. The verb damnificar presents several synonyms in Spanish, such as injuring, harming or breaking.

A word that is sometimes misspelled

With some frequency, it is written danmified instead of damaged. This error is caused by a change of position of the letters n and m and in linguistics this type of alterations are called metathesis ("cholconeta" instead of "mat", "Celebro" instead of "brain" or "cocretas" instead of "croquettes" would be other common examples of metathesis).

Photos: Fotolia - Nejron Photo - auremar