What Is the appropriate way to refer to those who have lived through traumatic events, illnesses and crimes? Take, for instance, the ill-starred Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. On the front page of its website it declares: “We will support victims and survivors to share their experience of sexual abuse.” Victims and survivors: are those two separate things? No: it all depends on your standpoint.

For instance, a recent Daily Telegraph story declared that “victims are set to withdraw support from the national inquiry into historic child sex abuse”. But it quoted Andi Lavery of “Catholic survivor group White Flowers Alba”. The group calls itself “a survivor advocacy group initially composed of clerical abuse survivors who experienced sexual violence as children”. A pattern emerges: outsiders, such as newspapers, refer to “victims”; those who experienced the abuse refer to themselves as “survivors”.