pronouns - Do you use the masculine or feminine with "victim"?

My mother tongue is Latin-based so I'm used to differences in male/female for neutral words. I don't know how this would work with some words in English.

If the "victim" in a sentence is neutral (ie: it could be either a man or a woman, in this context it makes absolutely no difference and we don't know if it's a man or a woman), should I use "his" or "her"?

My instinct would tell me to use his but I seem to remember encountering her in such a neutral situation before.

EDIT:

Here is the exact sentence (it's from a IT Security paper I'm writing):

Finally the paper will demonstrate how the attacker may control the
contents of the web pages delivered to the victim as well as redirect
his downloads towards malicious files.

As you can see I used his here, is that correct?

Answer

There really is no correct answer to this question, and not even a good consensus convention.

Here are some options, such as they are:

1. Generic he
   Doing this, however, in English -- a language without gendered nouns -- can prove inaccurate and may strike some readers as sexist. You could also do a generic she but this will definitely read as reactionary and may distract readers unintentionally.




2. Singular they
   This is probably the most common in non-formal writing and in speech. But many consider the mere idea of treating a plural pronoun as singular to be offensive to proper usage.




3. s/he or he or she
   
   You can always choose not to choose! This however can read as needlessly verbose and call attention to itself.




4. Alternate
   Many people opt to use male and female pronouns in alternate. This has the same issue as 1, but avoids the preferential treatment of the male gendered term. For longer texts (essays, books) this strikes me as the best approach.




5. Avoid the pronoun
   This can be awkward, but in some cases you can be slightly less economical and avoid the pronoun altogether. In your example sentence, you might write: "Someone could attack a victim and take that person's coat."

Again, no right answers here. Style guides differ and some just throw up their hands and remain neutral on the subject.