When a person has suffered serious damages as a result of some natural catastrophe or an accident, they are said to be a victim, that is, someone who has suffered significant damages. The term is normally used in the plural, as disasters affect a significant number of people.
As a general rule, the victims are cared for their basic needs by the public authorities until their situation is definitively restored. The causes that originate this type of situation are diverse: floods, earthquakes, large fires, landslides, hurricanes, etc.
Among the palliative measures adopted to help the victims we can mention subsidies, emergency bonds or bank loans under special conditions
In any case, after a catastrophe that affects a community, it is necessary to adopt urgent and exceptional measures so that the affected people can return to their normal lives as soon as possible. The usual procedure to deal with a catastrophe is usually the following: a calculation is made of the damage caused and a count of the people affected is carried out.
It is not exceptional that some groups of victims find themselves in a situation of helplessness, since the authorities do not always provide a quick and effective response to their needs.
The individual victim
This term is sometimes used to refer to a single individual who has been harmed to some extent. In this sense, in legal terminology there is the figure of the individual victim. Thus, any individual who is a victim of a crime and considers himself particularly offended, can bring a legal action as a victim. In the event that your claim is accepted, you can request the payment of some type of compensation.
The origin and identifying synonyms
Damnificado comes from Latin, specifically from the word damnun which means damage. The verb damnificar presents several synonyms in Spanish, such as injuring, harming or breaking.
A word that is sometimes misspelled
With some frequency, it is written danmified instead of damaged. This error is produced by a change in the position of the letters nymy and in linguistics this type of alterations are called metathesis ("cholconeta" instead of "mat", "celebro" instead of "brain" or "cocretas" instead of "Croquettes" would be other common examples of metathesis).
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