This study interrogates this complexity of violence by problematizing and complicating the categories of victim and perpetrator through Zimbabwean youth’s participation in political violence. The ZANU-PF party consolidated its rule in the post-2000 context through the establishment of militia bases across the country. The youth militias, who manned the 2008 bases and participated in serious violence against opposition supporters, refer to themselves as victims of the same violence. Given this context, it might be difficult to think of these youth as victims of the violence they perpetrated, but victimhood is an important category to interrogate because it is a category they have given themselves. In this paper I elaborate the complexity of the notion of victimhood first as a self-referential term, and secondly how problematic and complicated it is in the context of the youth’s conflicting and contradictory role in the struggle for democratization in Zimbabwe.