Learn English – When would you say “I felt violated”

phrase-usageusage

When a space is violated, it is intruded upon. When a law is violated, someone is breaking it. You can violate a religious place by desecrating it. Violating a person is synonymous with raping that person. But what do people mean when they say "I felt violated (by)" or "I feel violated"?

To me, it sounds like someone's feelings might have been hurt severely by somebody else, with the result of that someone being very upset (i.e. "p*ssed off") – but I can't back that up with any of these dictionaries:

Am I completely wrong with my assumption of feeling hurt? If not, can someone substantiate that assumption with a reference?

Only Your Dictionary seems to go in that direction:

to offend, insult, or outrage: to violate one's sense of decency

but to me, that sentence, "I felt violated", is more a reaction of how one was treated (overall, e.g. the manner in which one was talked to), rather than an individual offensive act… Is "feeling violated" used in that sense/nuance?

When would you say "I felt violated"?

Best Answer

You are correct in thinking that the original use of "violate", when applied to a person, is "rape". The use of violate to describe feelings is much more recent https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=feel+violated&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfeel%20violated%3B%2Cc0 enter image description here

I agree that online dictionaries don't seem to cover the issue. There are two aspects which seem clear. The first is that feeling violated refers to emotional distress caused by the inappropriate acts of others towards the speaker (one does not feel violated by seeing pictures of starving children, for instance - unless, perhaps, one is forced to look at them). The other is that there is no fixed threshold of offense. That is, there is no easy way to locate the transition between offended and violated. What is common is that the offense intrudes on the victim's sense of self, privacy or safety, just as rape intrudes upon the physical self.

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