Victimhood is extremely attractive. It is a method of buying innocence at the cost of someone else's guilt. Piled-on victimhoods raise my innocence to tower above everyone else's guilt, like adding storey upon storey to a high-rise. Acute identification with another's suffering, if selective, is really the co-option of someone else's victimhood to share and make it my own. It also offers me the opportunity to rescue and attack the victimiser in a justified way.
One of the reasons why the room can tense up when victimhood is donned is that its assertion is invariably an attack. The seesaw necessarily has two sides: victim and victimiser. Someone is guilty, and it's anyone but the victim. There is the awareness that guilt is now hanging in the air, waiting to drop onto someone's head, and anyone will do. Attack is always latent, ready to appear, for instance if it is asserted that the victim played a role in generating the undesirable outcome.
Listen out for stories of woe: feel, in your body, the differing responses to narrative A, where the individual takes responsibility for their part whilst acknowledging others, and narrative B, where the individual blames third parties and asserts there was nothing that could have been done to avert the misfortune; observe the willingness, in the case of narrative B, not to question the story, the remarkable credulousness that arises automatically.
Watch news stories and the tendency towards one-sidedness: victim and victimiser. Note how nuance destroys the newsworthiness of a story. No one wants to read about a complex situation where both sides have complex responsibilities, locked into a shared network. Clarity of good and evil is much more attractive, because it mirror's one's own psychic need to eliminate guilt by projecting it out onto to other.
What is the guilt? The guilt of (imagined) separation from God, the (apparent) destruction of unity wrought by the assertion of self as an individual. Individuality is always guilty, defended, defensive, and poised to attack. What is an individual in a vast universe?
Real compassion is above all non-selective; the suffering of people who have behaved awfully will elicit my compassion as much as that of the 'innocent'. After all, compassion is com-passion: co-suffering. What reveals much compassion to be identification with victimhood rather than co-experiencing suffering is its prerequisite that the victim be innocent. If someone 'asked for it', their suffering is not deemed worthy of co-experiencing. No one wants to co-experience the suffering of a murderer, because the purpose of co-experiencing is not sharing humanity but co-opting innocence.
True empathy recognises that we're all, to some extent, trapped in the ego world, and prompts helping others, where possible, to join us in escape. Not just the 'righteous holy innocents': everyone.