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To be able to discuss the way in which Diana may have been a victim it is vital to know what is meant
by the word victim. According to Oxford Dictionaries a victim is “a person who has come to feel
helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment” (Oxford University Press, n.d.). In
addition, Macmillan Dictionary defined victim as “someone who has suffered as a result of the
actions or negative attitudes of someone else or of people in general” and as “something that is
badly affected by a situation, a decision etc” (Macmillian Publishers Limited, n.d.). Furthermore,
according to Collins Dictionary “a victim is someone who has suffered as a result of someone else’s
actions or beliefs, or as a result of unpleasant circumstances” (Collins, n.d.). In this master’s thesis,
a victim is a person who has had to face some sort of ill-treatment, including psychological and
verbal abuse, during their lifetime from the people who are a part of their life, for example, family
and relations, and in the case of Diana, the media, including journalists, reports, and photographers.
In addition, that person has also suffered in some way, psychologically or physically, as a result of
the actions or attitudes and beliefs of someone else or because of unpleasant circumstances.
However, this thesis mostly deals with Diana as a victim in relation to the Royal Family and in part
the media. Nevertheless, Diana’s parents and siblings are also discussed briefly when it is of
importance to the topic, mostly in connection to Diana’s childhood.
The topic of Diana was chosen because from a very early age I have been interested in the royal
families of different countries, especially the British Royal Family. I have followed their lives on the
pages of magazines, on television and nowadays on the Internet, and because of that already had a
wide knowledge base on the British Royal Family before choosing this topic. The victim aspect of
Diana’s life in connection to the Royal Family was chosen as the focus of this Master’s Thesis because
it was something that I found to be interesting during my previous research into the topic when
writing my Candidate’s Thesis and a seminar paper on a similar, but larger in scale and less detailed,
topic. My Candidate’s Thesis dealt with three different aspects of Diana’s life in which she could be
viewed as a victim, namely her upbringing and family, the Royal Family and Prince Charles, and lastly
the media. The seminar paper dealt with the same aspect as this thesis, Diana as a victim of the
Royal Family, but the scope of the research was much smaller and because of that many
important
factors were not discussed. Even though the victim aspect of Diana’s life is something that I myself
have researched before, and has been at least alluded to in a large number of writings about her, it
is still something that I find to be interesting and worth researching, not least because, at the time