There's a lot of victims in the world. People who have gone through, are going through, or will go through some seriously awful shit. But if someone is a victim by choice, should we really feel any sympathy for them? I think not, as it only reinforces their behaviour and solidifies that victim mind-set.
When it comes to this subject, the only victims who are created as a direct consequence of anyone else's use of bad language, are people who make the conscious choice to be a victim.
If I call you a cunt, even if I intend to cause you offence, the choice is still yours whether to decide to be offended. This very simple understanding is something that has become difficult to comprehend within today's society, because it has become the norm for people to determine their self-worth based on the opinion of others.
Now, I would postulate that this was no accident. Insecurity is the greatest motivator for one to be a very good consumer, and so as long as we do value ourselves on the opinions of others, we will always want to buy more things and change who we are in order to increase our value through the eyes of our peers. But, if one holds their self to no standards other than their own, then the words of others who would seek to offend become a complete irrelevance.
We hear that one of the main reasons not to swear, is because kids might hear you. But, why does that matter if a child hears a word? What victim is created here? I see none. All you have done is broadened a child's vocabulary, which is arguably a good thing.
Swear words are only "bad" because we have for some reason decided that they are. So, a child using a ton of words that we think are bad, is only a bad thing because we have attributed negativity to something that we did not have to.
The irony in this is hard to ignore too. We can listen to a song on the radio that teaches little girls to twerk, little boys to see girls as toys, teaches that money is the most important thing in the world and you cannot be happy without etc.. A lot of mainstream songs nowadays contain all of these fucked up ideologies and a ton more. Now these are seriously corrupting things that can and do lead to real victims and widespread misery, yet we censor the word "arse" and think that we are saving our children from being corrupted?
This to me is fucking silly. Would you rather have someone say to your daughter, "You are fucking amazing. You can achieve anything you put your mind to," or, "you are ugly so you should put on make up otherwise you're worth nothing to society?"
The first one has what we refer to as a "bad word" in it. Yet, which one would truly do harm to the child and their psyche?
The simple fact of the matter is that words are words. It is completely unproductive and illogical to brand some of them as villains for no reason other than we get to complain about them being used. There is no intrinsic malice contained within the word fuck. No more than there is contained within the word damn, at least. But, one could cut another human deeply using a sentence composed of entirely "good" words. So perhaps we should call all of them bad words, or none of them at all.