The majority of people in society are adult and able-bodied, and when we
think about people becoming victims of crime we tend to assume an
adult, able-bodied victim. (Even the little old lady Christie presented
as the archetypal "ideal victim" is living a fairly active life.) People
who aren't adult and able-bodied seem to drop out of the picture when
we're thinking about victims - just as they do, arguably, in a lot of
other contexts.
The way we overlook old people and children has two main consequences.
Firstly, it means that we overlook the types of crime which those groups
are particularly likely to experience. Adults may feel intimidated by
fifteen-year-old hoodies, but what age-group is most likely to suffer
actual crime at the hands of a fifteen-year-old - to be robbed or
harassed or beaten up for looking weird? I'll tell you now, it's not
adults. Crimes committed by children against children are a
real dark figure, and they're a major factor in lots of kids' lives.
Elder abuse is another example: it's a crime that is not so much hidden
as completely invisible, except when a particularly scandalous example
comes to light.
Secondly - and I think even more importantly - we don't tend to see old people
or children as people in their own right, who are affected by becoming
victims of crime in the same way that we would be. We may be very kind
and caring in the way that we interact with them, we may be selflessly
dedicated to protecting and looking after them, but we don't usually
think they should have a say in what happens to them - or what's done
about it when something bad happens to them.
In this sense, the way that we think about old people and children is an
example of a much broader issue, which is central to contemporary
victimology. This is the question of who counts - who matters in
society, who has rights which are violated by crime. Classical
victimology drew a line that excluded lots of scruffy, disreputable,
unbalanced people, and ended up drawing the category of deserving
victims very narrowly indeed. Feminist victimology came on to the scene
saying that women count: women have rights which are violated by crime,
and by lots of other forms of unjust male power (including within the
criminal justice system). Radical victimology, in its different forms,
asserts the rights of other groups which have historically been pushed
to the margins. All of these ways of looking at victims say that this group counts, and members of this group should be able to say when they think they've been a victim, when they think their rights have been violated.
Is there a strand of radical victimology for children, or for old
people? Is anyone out there saying that a boy being beaten up for his
dinner money is just as bad as a man being mugged, or that an old woman
being taunted and slapped by her daughter-in-law is just as bad as a
prisoner being brutalised by prison warders?
If not, do you think there ever will be?
Why, or why not?
Monday 8 December 2014
Week 9: Victims' rights
What are the rights of victims in the criminal justice system? To answer that question, we need to ask: what is the role of victims in the criminal justice system? (If a victim has no other role than providing evidence, then victims' rights are the same as rights for witnesses.) And to answer that question...
Let's pause for a song (music optional):
Then, at some unspecified time, things changed: disputes between people were no longer sorted out by the people themselves, but had to be decided in accordance with the law. Did John Potts have the right to graze his animals by the vicarage? Were they even his in the first place - could he prove it? All of a sudden, any dispute could end up in the courts, where it would be decided according to laws backed by the authority of the government. In the process the role of the victim changed dramatically, from being at the centre of the conflict to merely being a witness to the crime.
All of this happened... in the past; some time before the nineteenth century, let's say. We do know that the police took over the responsibility of mounting criminal prosecutions, in Britain, some time in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that as a result a lot more prosecutions took place. We also know that, before the police got involved, prosecutions were very often dropped or settled amicably - which may not produce consistency between different offences, but does give a much bigger role to the victim.
A series of reforms, culminating in the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service in 1982, continued this process of standardisation, formalisation and centralisation, bringing consistency to criminal trials but reducing the role of the victim. However, by 1982 - the high water mark of this process - the contemporary movement for the recognition of victims' rights was already growing. Since that time, there has been a drive to bring victims back into the process, most successfully in the form of victim impact statements.
The problem with a lot of the victim-focused reforms we've seen is that governments see victims bureaucratically: a victim of crime, in this way of thinking, is someone who has accessed services designed for victims of crime (services operated by the police, the courts, the probation services...). Once the machinery of those services has been set in motion, the thinking goes, the victim should have the right to expect a certain level of service from it, e.g. the right to make a statement about the impact of the crime or the right to receive information about an offender's release from prison.
This approach is basically a good thing - it's better than not having the right to make a statement about the impact of the crime, after all. But it has its own problems. The key point is that this approach involves the criminal justice system looking at victims from the perspective of the system - not from victims' own perspective. This means that it's possible to reform the system so that it does more for victims, but only by improving or adding to what it already does.
If victims are sidelined by the system - if the system is letting victims down for structural reasons - you can't fix that by bolting on a bit of victim-centrality. If victims are to get what they want, a fresh start may be needed - which is where restorative justice shows a lot of potential.
Let's pause for a song (music optional):
Whose pigs are these?How did the criminal justice system get started? Once upon a time, there were no courts and no trials; when people had problems with one another, they sorted them out face to face. The vicar would have a word with John Potts, and they'd come to some arrangement: he'd keep his animals in his own garden, or the vicar would let him graze them by the vicarage on Mondays and Wednesdays, or whatever. (Other livestock - and other religious institutions - are available!) The thing is, there would be no laws being broken and no general principles being decided, and nobody would end up with a criminal record.
Whose pigs are these?
They are John Potts',
I can tell them by their spots,
And I found them in the vicarage garden.
- traditional
Then, at some unspecified time, things changed: disputes between people were no longer sorted out by the people themselves, but had to be decided in accordance with the law. Did John Potts have the right to graze his animals by the vicarage? Were they even his in the first place - could he prove it? All of a sudden, any dispute could end up in the courts, where it would be decided according to laws backed by the authority of the government. In the process the role of the victim changed dramatically, from being at the centre of the conflict to merely being a witness to the crime.
All of this happened... in the past; some time before the nineteenth century, let's say. We do know that the police took over the responsibility of mounting criminal prosecutions, in Britain, some time in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that as a result a lot more prosecutions took place. We also know that, before the police got involved, prosecutions were very often dropped or settled amicably - which may not produce consistency between different offences, but does give a much bigger role to the victim.
A series of reforms, culminating in the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service in 1982, continued this process of standardisation, formalisation and centralisation, bringing consistency to criminal trials but reducing the role of the victim. However, by 1982 - the high water mark of this process - the contemporary movement for the recognition of victims' rights was already growing. Since that time, there has been a drive to bring victims back into the process, most successfully in the form of victim impact statements.
The problem with a lot of the victim-focused reforms we've seen is that governments see victims bureaucratically: a victim of crime, in this way of thinking, is someone who has accessed services designed for victims of crime (services operated by the police, the courts, the probation services...). Once the machinery of those services has been set in motion, the thinking goes, the victim should have the right to expect a certain level of service from it, e.g. the right to make a statement about the impact of the crime or the right to receive information about an offender's release from prison.
This approach is basically a good thing - it's better than not having the right to make a statement about the impact of the crime, after all. But it has its own problems. The key point is that this approach involves the criminal justice system looking at victims from the perspective of the system - not from victims' own perspective. This means that it's possible to reform the system so that it does more for victims, but only by improving or adding to what it already does.
If victims are sidelined by the system - if the system is letting victims down for structural reasons - you can't fix that by bolting on a bit of victim-centrality. If victims are to get what they want, a fresh start may be needed - which is where restorative justice shows a lot of potential.
Tuesday 25 November 2014
Week 8: Victims in the criminal justice system
How does the criminal justice system - police, courts, probation, prisons - let victims down?
We can answer this question in two ways. In principle, firstly, there are three ways that criminal justice system agencies can fail victims:
So far, so abstract. The second way of answering the question is by asking another one: what role do victims have in the criminal justice system?
The police, firstly, have a huge range of functions, but two of the main ones are detecting crime and preventing crime. To detect crime they are utterly dependent on victims of crime: most 'incidents' are reported to them by victims. Historically the police have taken a very selective approach to recording crime, although over the last decade this has changed: the police are now supposed to record a crime every time a victim reports one, unless they have evidence that no crime has taken place. Controversy still surrounds police recorded crime figures, with recent allegations that up to 25% of reported sexual assaults were left unrecorded. The police can be seen as a 'gatekeeper' to the criminal justice system - and by failing to record particular crimes, they effectively keep the victims of those crimes out of the system.
As for preventing crime, it's impossible to prevent crime completely - and, when a crime is committed, there's always room for debate as to whether it was the police's responsibility to stop it. But, when a potential victim calls the police and has no response, or when a serious offender is free to reoffend undetected under another name or in another place, we can say that the victim has been failed.
As for the courts, it can be argued that they fail victims of crime all the time. The police took over the responsibility of mounting criminal prosecutions, in Britain, some time in the first half of the nineteenth century, and as a result a lot more prosecutions took place. Before that time, prosecutions were very often dropped or settled amicably - which, clearly, gives a much bigger role to the victim. A series of reforms, culminating in the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service in 1982, continued this process, standardising criminal trials but reducing the role of the victim.
So there's a real argument that victims are failed by the courts every time a crime goes to court - although, as I said at the outset, it's not always easy to identify actual examples of this happening. And, if the court system is structurally unfriendly to victims in general, it's also possible that it's more unfriendly to some victims than others: women, in particular, often suffer institutional bias within the court.
How to address these problems - by giving victims more rights & guaranteeing a certain level of service? Or by stepping outside the entire criminal justice framework and thinking 'restorative'?
We can answer this question in two ways. In principle, firstly, there are three ways that criminal justice system agencies can fail victims:
- individual failings: people doing their jobs badly (one corrupt police officer, one judge falling asleep in court)
- institutional bias: agencies working badly in ways that systematically affect particular groups or victims of particular crimes (Black youth being harassed by the police, rape defendants being acquitted disproportionately often)
- structural failings: people suffering as a result of the system working normally, without any individual failings or institutional bias (traumatised victims being left unsupported, rape victims suffering 'secondary victimisation' in court)
So far, so abstract. The second way of answering the question is by asking another one: what role do victims have in the criminal justice system?
The police, firstly, have a huge range of functions, but two of the main ones are detecting crime and preventing crime. To detect crime they are utterly dependent on victims of crime: most 'incidents' are reported to them by victims. Historically the police have taken a very selective approach to recording crime, although over the last decade this has changed: the police are now supposed to record a crime every time a victim reports one, unless they have evidence that no crime has taken place. Controversy still surrounds police recorded crime figures, with recent allegations that up to 25% of reported sexual assaults were left unrecorded. The police can be seen as a 'gatekeeper' to the criminal justice system - and by failing to record particular crimes, they effectively keep the victims of those crimes out of the system.
As for preventing crime, it's impossible to prevent crime completely - and, when a crime is committed, there's always room for debate as to whether it was the police's responsibility to stop it. But, when a potential victim calls the police and has no response, or when a serious offender is free to reoffend undetected under another name or in another place, we can say that the victim has been failed.
As for the courts, it can be argued that they fail victims of crime all the time. The police took over the responsibility of mounting criminal prosecutions, in Britain, some time in the first half of the nineteenth century, and as a result a lot more prosecutions took place. Before that time, prosecutions were very often dropped or settled amicably - which, clearly, gives a much bigger role to the victim. A series of reforms, culminating in the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service in 1982, continued this process, standardising criminal trials but reducing the role of the victim.
So there's a real argument that victims are failed by the courts every time a crime goes to court - although, as I said at the outset, it's not always easy to identify actual examples of this happening. And, if the court system is structurally unfriendly to victims in general, it's also possible that it's more unfriendly to some victims than others: women, in particular, often suffer institutional bias within the court.
How to address these problems - by giving victims more rights & guaranteeing a certain level of service? Or by stepping outside the entire criminal justice framework and thinking 'restorative'?
Thursday 20 November 2014
Week 7: Who are the victims?
This
week we looked at what we know about crime victims, and how we know about crime victims.
For this blog post I want to make two points, or three if you include the thing about the zebra.
Firstly, our knowledge is incomplete. This is a common problem with social statistics: this is the reason why the news doesn't report the number of unemployed people, but always gives the number of those out of work and claiming benefits. Just as nobody knows precisely how many people are not working, nobody knows precisely how many crimes are committed. We do know precisely how many crimes are recorded by the police, but we also know that lots of crimes aren't - which is why we use figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales. But the CSEW is a sample-based survey - they ask roughly 50,000 people about their experiences of crime, then multiply out to give an estimate of the number of crimes in the country as a whole. There is no precisely accurate figure for the number of crimes that are committed. What's more, because it's a residential survey completed by adults, we know that the BCS is highly unlikely to record crimes against some groups of people: for example, children, dependent elderly people, students living in halls, people of no fixed abode...
Every statement about crime levels should be followed by "as far as we know".
Secondly, crime is highly patterned (as far as we know). To some extent, the feminist and radical versions of victimology are borne out by the figures. Social exclusion: living in a neighbourhood with "high levels of disorder" is associated with a higher risk of crime. Ethnicity: BME people are statistically at a higher risk of crime than Whites, even if we're only talking about "colour-blind" crimes like burglary. Gender: almost half of all victims of domestic violence are repeat victims, suggesting very strongly that domestic violence is - as feminists say - part of a continuing relationship of unequal power. There are also some interesting and very significant findings about age, which don't quite fit any of the main variants of victimology. If you're under 25, your statistical risk of crime is much higher than average, particularly if you're living alone or with other young people. Being young may also make it that much harder to get redress, or to be taken seriously by the criminal justice system at all.
Thirdly, the thing about the zebra. I showed a picture of a zebra in the lecture because of a story - which I didn't have time to tell - about the risk of accidents. Supposedly, a man who was terrified of being in a railway accident spent a long time trying to work out ways of making train travel safer. He concluded that his best option was to travel everywhere with a horse, because there were far fewer train crashes when the train had a horse on board than when it didn't. His ideal solution was to trade up from a horse to a zebra: the statistics did record a few crashes when there had been a horse on the train, but none at all involving a zebra.
Assuming this is true, does it really mean that taking a zebra with you on a train makes you safer? Obviously not - but why not? Similarly, if (according to police figures) 20% of domestic burglaries involve the burglar getting in through an open window, does this mean that leaving a window open is actually safer - since, after all, 80% of burglaries didn't involve an open window? Again, this conclusion seems wrong, but why?
The zebra example is fairly easy. Let's say that 1 in every 1,000 train journeys ends in a crash (the real figure is much lower, of course). Then let's say that there are a million train journeys in a year, and 2,000 of them involve somebody transporting a horse. Then there will be 1,000 train crashes, out of which 2 involve a horse and 998 don't. But that doesn't mean that travelling with a horse is safer, just that it's rarer: the rate of crashes is the same (2 out of 2,000, 998 out of 998,000).
As for the open windows, we need a couple more pieces of information to work that one out. According to official figures, the annual risk of burglary is 2.5% - unless you've got "no home security measures" (which I'll translate as meaning "open windows"), in which case it's 25%. So if you're in group A (open windows) you have a 25% chance of becoming one of 20% of all burglaries; if you're in group B (closed windows) you have a less-than-2.5% chance of becoming one of the other 80%. (It's less than 2.5% because the 2.5% risk is averaged out over all households, some of which have a 25% risk as part of group A.)
Now, say you're looking at a city of 4,000,000 households (imaginary figure). In any one year, 2.5% of them will be burgled: there will be 100,000 burglaries (ignoring repeat burglaries for the time being). 20,000 of those burglaries will be of households with open windows (20% of 100,000 = 20,000). But we also know that households with open windows had a 25% risk of being burgled - and that tells us that, overall, there are only 80,000 households in the city which leave their windows open. (There's a joke here about how many of those are in Fallowfield, but I won't stoop to it.) This is the crucial missing piece of information: 20% of burglaries are of households with an open window even though there are very few of them. 20% of burglaries occur in 2% of households (80,000 / 4,000,000 = 0.02 = 2%). The other 98% have a risk of burglary which is even lower than 2.5%; in fact it's just slightly over 2% (80,000 / 3,920,000 = 0.204 = 2.04%).
In the horse/zebra example, the numbers look so different because a single rate (of train crashes) is applied to two very different populations (the number of train journeys on one hand, the much smaller number of journeys involving a horse on the other). The 'open window' example is more complex because there are two different rates: a low rate for a very large population, a much higher rate for a very small one.
Why does all this matter? It matters because we need to know the underlying numbers in order to make sense of the statistics - and making sense of the statistics is vital if we're going to get an accurate picture of questions of power, injustice and social exclusion in our society. Suppose you hear that 5,000 Romanians have entered Britain in the past year: what does that mean? Is it a lot? Is it ten times as much as the previous year, or half as much? ten times as many Romanians as Poles, or half as many? Or suppose you hear that 100 Manchester residents of Asian origin were arrested for shoplifting in the past year, but only 20 Chinese - does this tell you that the Chinese population of Manchester is five times as law-abiding as the Asian population? If not, why not?
PS According to Manchester City Council, the main ethnic groups in Manchester are as follows:
White 66.7%
Asian 14.4%
Black 8.6%
Mixed 4.7%
Chinese 2.7%
Arab 1.9%
Other 1.2%
For this blog post I want to make two points, or three if you include the thing about the zebra.
Firstly, our knowledge is incomplete. This is a common problem with social statistics: this is the reason why the news doesn't report the number of unemployed people, but always gives the number of those out of work and claiming benefits. Just as nobody knows precisely how many people are not working, nobody knows precisely how many crimes are committed. We do know precisely how many crimes are recorded by the police, but we also know that lots of crimes aren't - which is why we use figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales. But the CSEW is a sample-based survey - they ask roughly 50,000 people about their experiences of crime, then multiply out to give an estimate of the number of crimes in the country as a whole. There is no precisely accurate figure for the number of crimes that are committed. What's more, because it's a residential survey completed by adults, we know that the BCS is highly unlikely to record crimes against some groups of people: for example, children, dependent elderly people, students living in halls, people of no fixed abode...
Every statement about crime levels should be followed by "as far as we know".
Secondly, crime is highly patterned (as far as we know). To some extent, the feminist and radical versions of victimology are borne out by the figures. Social exclusion: living in a neighbourhood with "high levels of disorder" is associated with a higher risk of crime. Ethnicity: BME people are statistically at a higher risk of crime than Whites, even if we're only talking about "colour-blind" crimes like burglary. Gender: almost half of all victims of domestic violence are repeat victims, suggesting very strongly that domestic violence is - as feminists say - part of a continuing relationship of unequal power. There are also some interesting and very significant findings about age, which don't quite fit any of the main variants of victimology. If you're under 25, your statistical risk of crime is much higher than average, particularly if you're living alone or with other young people. Being young may also make it that much harder to get redress, or to be taken seriously by the criminal justice system at all.
Thirdly, the thing about the zebra. I showed a picture of a zebra in the lecture because of a story - which I didn't have time to tell - about the risk of accidents. Supposedly, a man who was terrified of being in a railway accident spent a long time trying to work out ways of making train travel safer. He concluded that his best option was to travel everywhere with a horse, because there were far fewer train crashes when the train had a horse on board than when it didn't. His ideal solution was to trade up from a horse to a zebra: the statistics did record a few crashes when there had been a horse on the train, but none at all involving a zebra.
Assuming this is true, does it really mean that taking a zebra with you on a train makes you safer? Obviously not - but why not? Similarly, if (according to police figures) 20% of domestic burglaries involve the burglar getting in through an open window, does this mean that leaving a window open is actually safer - since, after all, 80% of burglaries didn't involve an open window? Again, this conclusion seems wrong, but why?
The zebra example is fairly easy. Let's say that 1 in every 1,000 train journeys ends in a crash (the real figure is much lower, of course). Then let's say that there are a million train journeys in a year, and 2,000 of them involve somebody transporting a horse. Then there will be 1,000 train crashes, out of which 2 involve a horse and 998 don't. But that doesn't mean that travelling with a horse is safer, just that it's rarer: the rate of crashes is the same (2 out of 2,000, 998 out of 998,000).
As for the open windows, we need a couple more pieces of information to work that one out. According to official figures, the annual risk of burglary is 2.5% - unless you've got "no home security measures" (which I'll translate as meaning "open windows"), in which case it's 25%. So if you're in group A (open windows) you have a 25% chance of becoming one of 20% of all burglaries; if you're in group B (closed windows) you have a less-than-2.5% chance of becoming one of the other 80%. (It's less than 2.5% because the 2.5% risk is averaged out over all households, some of which have a 25% risk as part of group A.)
Now, say you're looking at a city of 4,000,000 households (imaginary figure). In any one year, 2.5% of them will be burgled: there will be 100,000 burglaries (ignoring repeat burglaries for the time being). 20,000 of those burglaries will be of households with open windows (20% of 100,000 = 20,000). But we also know that households with open windows had a 25% risk of being burgled - and that tells us that, overall, there are only 80,000 households in the city which leave their windows open. (There's a joke here about how many of those are in Fallowfield, but I won't stoop to it.) This is the crucial missing piece of information: 20% of burglaries are of households with an open window even though there are very few of them. 20% of burglaries occur in 2% of households (80,000 / 4,000,000 = 0.02 = 2%). The other 98% have a risk of burglary which is even lower than 2.5%; in fact it's just slightly over 2% (80,000 / 3,920,000 = 0.204 = 2.04%).
In the horse/zebra example, the numbers look so different because a single rate (of train crashes) is applied to two very different populations (the number of train journeys on one hand, the much smaller number of journeys involving a horse on the other). The 'open window' example is more complex because there are two different rates: a low rate for a very large population, a much higher rate for a very small one.
Why does all this matter? It matters because we need to know the underlying numbers in order to make sense of the statistics - and making sense of the statistics is vital if we're going to get an accurate picture of questions of power, injustice and social exclusion in our society. Suppose you hear that 5,000 Romanians have entered Britain in the past year: what does that mean? Is it a lot? Is it ten times as much as the previous year, or half as much? ten times as many Romanians as Poles, or half as many? Or suppose you hear that 100 Manchester residents of Asian origin were arrested for shoplifting in the past year, but only 20 Chinese - does this tell you that the Chinese population of Manchester is five times as law-abiding as the Asian population? If not, why not?
PS According to Manchester City Council, the main ethnic groups in Manchester are as follows:
White 66.7%
Asian 14.4%
Black 8.6%
Mixed 4.7%
Chinese 2.7%
Arab 1.9%
Other 1.2%
Tuesday 4 November 2014
Week 5: Feminist and radical victimology
You don't have to be a feminist to understand feminist victimology. All you need is a bit of an understanding of classical victimology and the 'ideal victim' model, and - most important - a bit of an understanding of what was wrong with them.
Classical victimology started from the assumption that things were basically OK. There was society, consisting mostly of nice, normal people and functioning in a normal and orderly way; within that, there was a problem of crime, just as there might be a localised problem of poverty or overcrowded housing or whatever. Each of these problems was associated with a particular sub-section of society; once governments understood those parts of society better, they could bring in reforms to address the problems.
In the case of crime, the classical victimologists thought they'd identified a sub-section of society consisting of criminals and victims: victim-prone individuals, victim-precipitators, members of a sub-culture of violence and so on. Thinking of victims as a social problem, like bad drains or failing schools, meant that we no longer had to think of them as victims. Only when one of those nice, normal people became a victim of crime - somebody who couldn't be dismissed as 'victim-prone', part of a 'victim-offender dyad' and so on - only then were we dealing with people who deserved recognition as victims of crime. This is the function of the 'ideal victim' model - it puts some victims on a pedestal, at the cost of ignoring all the rest.
The key, fundamental point about feminist victimology is that it started from the position that this is not OK - and it's not OK because things in general are not OK. To put that in slightly more academic language, feminists saw society in terms of an unjust balance of power between the sexes - male power over women, in short. Looked at from that perspective, it becomes obvious that a lot of crimes against women are actually crimes of male power over women. This makes it impossible to lump criminals and victims together, or to treat victims as part of the problem of crime. Instead, the problem of crime (against women) becomes part of a much bigger problem, the problem of male dominance. And a woman can be a victim of male power in many different ways before she ever becomes a victim of crime.
So the key insight of feminist victimologists was that crime isn't a marginal problem within a society that's working OK; it's a serious problem, and a symptom of bigger problems in a fundamentally unjust society. And this is also the key assumption of radical victimology: that we are living in a society structured by relationships of unequal power; that those relationships are systematically unjust; and that this is the context within which we should think about crime and victimisation.
Society is structured by relationships of unequal power: in everything you do, every day of your life, you are always interacting with people who have power over you. Some of the time the tables are turned and you have power over other people; if you're very lucky, very ambitious or both, you can reach a point where you have power over a lot of other people. Most people spend most of their time interacting with people who have power over them - the boss, the DSS, the police...
Those relationships are systematically unjust: from the day they're born, some people are much, much more likely to grow up to be doctors and lawyers than others; some people are much, much more likely to end up living in poverty and be victims of violence and theft. These differences aren't random: the Bad Fairy doesn't pick every fourth baby in a maternity ward, or all the babies whose surnames begin with an R. Being born into a disadvantaged group is bad luck in terms of future prosperity. And that bad luck doesn't simply get handed out on day one: it's dealt out over and over again as you go through life.
This is the context in which we should think about crime: radical victimologists argue that this context of systematic injustice makes a huge difference to how we think about crime. And not only crime: this framework has a decisive influence on our ideas about criminal justice and how best to respond to crime. Is it a good idea to put security guards on the doors of a shopping centre and tell them to bar suspicious-looking characters? Is it a good idea to introduce police patrols on an estate to address concerns about youths hanging around? If a teenage drug addict has confessed to a burglary, is it a good idea to lock him up? You'll get very different answers to those questions, depending on whether you start from the classical position (society is basically working OK, except for this problem of crime) or a radical position (urban youth are systematically discriminated against in our unjust society).
A brief point about terminology
Sandra Walklate argues that "radical victimology" is something specific: politically left-wing, class-based, deriving from the "left realist" school of criminology and keen on using crime surveys to measure the prevalence of crime in working-class areas. She advocates what she calls "critical victimology", which would be less class-based and have less of a quantitative orientation. Some victimologists have started using this label, but others haven't. I think it's simpler just to say that radical victimology doesn't have to be class-based (or quantitative) and use the label more generally: you can do radical victimology by focusing on ethnicity and racism, on white-collar crime, on disability or on sexuality. The key points are the ones I listed above - that power relations are fundamental to the way society is structured; that those power relations are unjust; and that those unjust power relations are the context within which we should think about crime and criminal justice.
Tuesday 28 October 2014
Week 4: Classical and 'lifestyle' victimology
Classical victimology is not a great way of looking at victims. It's interesting in parts, and includes some ideas and approaches which are genuinely useful. But as a whole it's very ideological and rather outdated. To put it another way, contemporary
victimology is one of the more critical parts of
criminology - and classical victimology is a large part of
what it's critical of.
Flash back for a moment to the "Ideal Victim". Imagine that you're in charge of paying insurance or compensation claims. You don't want to pay out any more than you have to, but you don't want to get a bad public image. The obvious solution is to pay out to the victims who are closest to the Ideal Victim model, because those cases will seem the most deserving. If you only pay out to those cases, you can save a lot of money but the public won't mind. Nils Christie's great insight was that, the more we think in terms of the 'Ideal Victim', the less attention we pay to all the other poor so-and-so's who are victims of crime but whose faces don't fit.
Classical victimology is, in many ways, about all the victims whose faces don't fit; specifically, it's dedicated to proving that their faces don't fit. A lot of classical victimology is - in academic language - highly controversial and rests on discredited assumptions. If you go back to the 1960s and 70s, you can find very respectable academic victimologists arguing seriously that men hit their wives because their wives nag them, or that a girl who gets raped after a night out has brought it on herself. (The Accused only came out in 1988, and it was pretty controversial even then.) These arguments rest on highly discredited assumptions - to all intents and purposes, they're wrong. But they add up to a certain way of looking at victims.
The key concepts associated with classical victimology can be seen as distancing devices, ways of blocking sympathy: victims are victim-prone, i.e. they're pathologically vulnerable to crime; victims precipitate attacks on them, i.e. they're self-destructive and neurotic; victims are part of a sub-culture of violence, i.e. they're socially marginal individuals with chaotic lifestyles. Whichever way you look at it, victims - most victims - are not like us; we can reserve our sympathy for the minority of victims who fit the 'Ideal Victim' template. Classical victimology is about ignoring, or downgrading, or refusing sympathy to the majority of actual victims of crime.
Having said all of that, classical victimology did give us some useful ways of looking at crime. Once you drop the key assumption of classical victimology and stop seeing victims as a problem - once you acknowledge that sympathy should be given, in principle, to all victims - the broader 'toolkit' of classical victimology turns out to have some quite useful things in it. We don't now call people 'victim-prone' because we think they're weird and pathologically self-destructive; nevertheless, it's a matter of sociological fact that young males are more likely to be victims of violent assault, that poorer residential areas are more likely to be high-crime areas, and so on. Maybe 'victim-proneness' is a social category, not a personal one. The idea of a 'subculture of violence', handing deviant values down from generation to generation, seems a bit melodramatic these days, but it's undeniable that some people have more violent lifestyles than others. And so on. Even victim precipitation could be a useful way of understanding the sequence of events that leads up to a crime, if you don't use it as a way of blaming the victim.
One other thing: when we talk about either classical victimology or the Ideal Victim, we very often seem to be talking in gendered terms - the virtuous little old lady, the 'victim-offender dyad' of domestic violence, rape and victim precipitation. Why do you think this is?
Next week: feminism, followed shortly by a revolution in victimology.
Flash back for a moment to the "Ideal Victim". Imagine that you're in charge of paying insurance or compensation claims. You don't want to pay out any more than you have to, but you don't want to get a bad public image. The obvious solution is to pay out to the victims who are closest to the Ideal Victim model, because those cases will seem the most deserving. If you only pay out to those cases, you can save a lot of money but the public won't mind. Nils Christie's great insight was that, the more we think in terms of the 'Ideal Victim', the less attention we pay to all the other poor so-and-so's who are victims of crime but whose faces don't fit.
Classical victimology is, in many ways, about all the victims whose faces don't fit; specifically, it's dedicated to proving that their faces don't fit. A lot of classical victimology is - in academic language - highly controversial and rests on discredited assumptions. If you go back to the 1960s and 70s, you can find very respectable academic victimologists arguing seriously that men hit their wives because their wives nag them, or that a girl who gets raped after a night out has brought it on herself. (The Accused only came out in 1988, and it was pretty controversial even then.) These arguments rest on highly discredited assumptions - to all intents and purposes, they're wrong. But they add up to a certain way of looking at victims.
The key concepts associated with classical victimology can be seen as distancing devices, ways of blocking sympathy: victims are victim-prone, i.e. they're pathologically vulnerable to crime; victims precipitate attacks on them, i.e. they're self-destructive and neurotic; victims are part of a sub-culture of violence, i.e. they're socially marginal individuals with chaotic lifestyles. Whichever way you look at it, victims - most victims - are not like us; we can reserve our sympathy for the minority of victims who fit the 'Ideal Victim' template. Classical victimology is about ignoring, or downgrading, or refusing sympathy to the majority of actual victims of crime.
Having said all of that, classical victimology did give us some useful ways of looking at crime. Once you drop the key assumption of classical victimology and stop seeing victims as a problem - once you acknowledge that sympathy should be given, in principle, to all victims - the broader 'toolkit' of classical victimology turns out to have some quite useful things in it. We don't now call people 'victim-prone' because we think they're weird and pathologically self-destructive; nevertheless, it's a matter of sociological fact that young males are more likely to be victims of violent assault, that poorer residential areas are more likely to be high-crime areas, and so on. Maybe 'victim-proneness' is a social category, not a personal one. The idea of a 'subculture of violence', handing deviant values down from generation to generation, seems a bit melodramatic these days, but it's undeniable that some people have more violent lifestyles than others. And so on. Even victim precipitation could be a useful way of understanding the sequence of events that leads up to a crime, if you don't use it as a way of blaming the victim.
One other thing: when we talk about either classical victimology or the Ideal Victim, we very often seem to be talking in gendered terms - the virtuous little old lady, the 'victim-offender dyad' of domestic violence, rape and victim precipitation. Why do you think this is?
Next week: feminism, followed shortly by a revolution in victimology.
Wednesday 22 October 2014
Week 3: What is a victim of crime?
This lecture starts with a very straightforward question and unpacks it, in two different ways.
First, we looked at the definition of 'victim of crime' and asked what happens when we take it literally. Victims of crime are people we sympathise with, people who we feel deserve something: what happens if we restrict that mental category to people who have been directly affected by an illegal action? It turns out that what happens is quite unsatisfactory: there are lots of cases where we want to think of somebody as a victim of crime, even if they haven't been directly affected (relatives of murder victims), even if no law has been broken (white-collar crime), even if years have passed between the action and its effects (work-related injury).
In other words, there's a constant pressure to expand the category of "victim of crime" to include people who haven't been directly victimised, or people whose victimisation wasn't actually a crime. There is no correct answer to the question of how far the category should be expanded: if a murder victim's partner is also a victim, what about her close friends? work colleagues? old schoolfriends? But the literal approach - narrowing down the category to actual victims of actual crimes - is clearly unsatisfactory. At the same time, of course, our ideas and assumptions about what makes a victim deserve our sympathy tend to push the other way, narrowing down the category till it only includes 'ideal victim' types.
Second, we looked at how symbolically loaded the experience of being a victim can be. The sense of violation that burglary victims often feel isn't just an emotional reaction to having the room messed up. Ideas of personal continuity and of an 'ordered world' are very deeply rooted in our psychology; in the case of burglary, we often relate our sense of identity to a personal space which is secure from the world outside. Becoming a victim of crime can be deeply disturbing, destroying feelings of security which we thought we could rely on. Ironically, this experience is often all the more upsetting for people who previously felt confident and self-reliant; attitudes of fatalism and keeping your head down aren't ideal as far as getting on in life is concerned, but for recovering from being a victim of crime they're very appropriate.
The point about the symbolic experience of being a victim is that it's one that we've all had, whether or not we've been a victim of crime - and we all know how upsetting it is. I think this has a lot to do with the way we think about victims of crime. We want those who deserve sympathy to get it - just as we'd want it for ourselves: so we expand the category of 'victim of crime' to include asbestosis victims, Bhopal victims, victims' relatives and so on. At the same time, we don't want anyone who doesn't deserve sympathy to get it, so we watch victims suspiciously to see whether they're sufficiently deserving or not.
Maybe it's possible to step out of this difficult psychological terrain altogether, and talk about avoidable suffering and harm without labelling those who suffer as 'victims'. Nils Christie argued that naming somebody as a 'victim' leads directly to naming somebody else as an 'offender', then putting the victim on a pedestal and demonising the offender. Writers in the 'social harm' school (such as Richard Garside) take this argument further, arguing that many forms of avoidable harm don't have an identifiable 'offender' at all: thinking in terms of victims and offenders may be a distraction or worse, focusing attention on individual law-breakers rather than harmful social structures.
On the other hand, this unit is about victims, so maybe we should assume for the time being that there are such things as victims of crime.
Now on Moodle: some notes on the case study. Have fun with it, and feel free to get in touch with me if there's anything you're not sure about.
First, we looked at the definition of 'victim of crime' and asked what happens when we take it literally. Victims of crime are people we sympathise with, people who we feel deserve something: what happens if we restrict that mental category to people who have been directly affected by an illegal action? It turns out that what happens is quite unsatisfactory: there are lots of cases where we want to think of somebody as a victim of crime, even if they haven't been directly affected (relatives of murder victims), even if no law has been broken (white-collar crime), even if years have passed between the action and its effects (work-related injury).
In other words, there's a constant pressure to expand the category of "victim of crime" to include people who haven't been directly victimised, or people whose victimisation wasn't actually a crime. There is no correct answer to the question of how far the category should be expanded: if a murder victim's partner is also a victim, what about her close friends? work colleagues? old schoolfriends? But the literal approach - narrowing down the category to actual victims of actual crimes - is clearly unsatisfactory. At the same time, of course, our ideas and assumptions about what makes a victim deserve our sympathy tend to push the other way, narrowing down the category till it only includes 'ideal victim' types.
Second, we looked at how symbolically loaded the experience of being a victim can be. The sense of violation that burglary victims often feel isn't just an emotional reaction to having the room messed up. Ideas of personal continuity and of an 'ordered world' are very deeply rooted in our psychology; in the case of burglary, we often relate our sense of identity to a personal space which is secure from the world outside. Becoming a victim of crime can be deeply disturbing, destroying feelings of security which we thought we could rely on. Ironically, this experience is often all the more upsetting for people who previously felt confident and self-reliant; attitudes of fatalism and keeping your head down aren't ideal as far as getting on in life is concerned, but for recovering from being a victim of crime they're very appropriate.
The point about the symbolic experience of being a victim is that it's one that we've all had, whether or not we've been a victim of crime - and we all know how upsetting it is. I think this has a lot to do with the way we think about victims of crime. We want those who deserve sympathy to get it - just as we'd want it for ourselves: so we expand the category of 'victim of crime' to include asbestosis victims, Bhopal victims, victims' relatives and so on. At the same time, we don't want anyone who doesn't deserve sympathy to get it, so we watch victims suspiciously to see whether they're sufficiently deserving or not.
Maybe it's possible to step out of this difficult psychological terrain altogether, and talk about avoidable suffering and harm without labelling those who suffer as 'victims'. Nils Christie argued that naming somebody as a 'victim' leads directly to naming somebody else as an 'offender', then putting the victim on a pedestal and demonising the offender. Writers in the 'social harm' school (such as Richard Garside) take this argument further, arguing that many forms of avoidable harm don't have an identifiable 'offender' at all: thinking in terms of victims and offenders may be a distraction or worse, focusing attention on individual law-breakers rather than harmful social structures.
On the other hand, this unit is about victims, so maybe we should assume for the time being that there are such things as victims of crime.
Now on Moodle: some notes on the case study. Have fun with it, and feel free to get in touch with me if there's anything you're not sure about.
Tuesday 14 October 2014
Week 2: The 'Ideal Victim'
This week we looked at Nils Christie's paper "The Ideal Victim".
I'm not going to talk here about the model of the 'ideal victim' and how it's put together - that's all in the lecture (and on the slides), and the paper itself is easy enough to read. What I'm going to focus on is the purpose of the model, and how it links up with critical perspectives on victims of crime.
As you know, Christie argues that we have a lot of preconceptions about what a victim ought to be like. The result is that how much recognition we give to actual victims of crime depends on how closely they fit the model of the 'ideal victim'. The more vulnerable and innocent the victim is, essentially, the easier it is to see them as a victim. Consequently, if we want people to take somebody seriously as a victim, we will tend to emphasise how weak they are and how virtuously they were acting at the time of the crime. This makes it possible to draw a nice clear line between the victim (weak, innocent and one of us) and the offender ("a dangerous man coming from far away" in Christie's words).
Thinking about some of the (real and fictional) examples we've looked at so far, and about your own knowledge of crime, I hope you'll agree that the "weak innocent victim"/"big bad stranger" model is very far from being typical of actual crimes. Most victims aren't totally innocent and virtuous in their conduct (why should they be?), and most offenders aren't predatory strangers. So the more we think in terms of the 'ideal victim', the harder it is to see actual victims of crime, and actual offenders, for what they are.
For now - and looking ahead to the first essay - there are two points to bear in mind. Firstly, Christie didn't make up the 'ideal victim': there's a lot of pressure in society to concentrate on people who live up to the model of the 'ideal victim' (from the government, from the media, from our own prejudices). Secondly, there are lots of victims of crime who don't live up to that model, and consequently don't get much sympathy or support. When you're thinking about actual victims of crime, and the ways in which they may have been failed by the criminal justice system, it may well be worth thinking back to the 'Ideal Victim'.
The 'Ideal Victim' - despite the name - is not an ideal. It's a standard that some victims meet, but many don't; in fact, probably most victims don't meet it. And we shouldn't ask them to.
I'm not going to talk here about the model of the 'ideal victim' and how it's put together - that's all in the lecture (and on the slides), and the paper itself is easy enough to read. What I'm going to focus on is the purpose of the model, and how it links up with critical perspectives on victims of crime.
As you know, Christie argues that we have a lot of preconceptions about what a victim ought to be like. The result is that how much recognition we give to actual victims of crime depends on how closely they fit the model of the 'ideal victim'. The more vulnerable and innocent the victim is, essentially, the easier it is to see them as a victim. Consequently, if we want people to take somebody seriously as a victim, we will tend to emphasise how weak they are and how virtuously they were acting at the time of the crime. This makes it possible to draw a nice clear line between the victim (weak, innocent and one of us) and the offender ("a dangerous man coming from far away" in Christie's words).
Thinking about some of the (real and fictional) examples we've looked at so far, and about your own knowledge of crime, I hope you'll agree that the "weak innocent victim"/"big bad stranger" model is very far from being typical of actual crimes. Most victims aren't totally innocent and virtuous in their conduct (why should they be?), and most offenders aren't predatory strangers. So the more we think in terms of the 'ideal victim', the harder it is to see actual victims of crime, and actual offenders, for what they are.
For now - and looking ahead to the first essay - there are two points to bear in mind. Firstly, Christie didn't make up the 'ideal victim': there's a lot of pressure in society to concentrate on people who live up to the model of the 'ideal victim' (from the government, from the media, from our own prejudices). Secondly, there are lots of victims of crime who don't live up to that model, and consequently don't get much sympathy or support. When you're thinking about actual victims of crime, and the ways in which they may have been failed by the criminal justice system, it may well be worth thinking back to the 'Ideal Victim'.
The 'Ideal Victim' - despite the name - is not an ideal. It's a standard that some victims meet, but many don't; in fact, probably most victims don't meet it. And we shouldn't ask them to.
Tuesday 7 October 2014
Week 1: Hallo world!
This is the first post on the unit blog for Victims and Restorative Justice; thanks for checking it out.
I'll be using this blog to post feedback on our seminar discussions and any other ideas, thoughts and comments relating to each week's teaching.
There were some interesting discussions in the first week's seminars. Pulling together the comments from different groups, it seems as if people are definitely interested in
Other than that there's not a lot to say in this first week, except
I'll be using this blog to post feedback on our seminar discussions and any other ideas, thoughts and comments relating to each week's teaching.
There were some interesting discussions in the first week's seminars. Pulling together the comments from different groups, it seems as if people are definitely interested in
- how victims are treated within the criminal justice system
- crimes against women
- restorative justice, in particular how RJ works in practice
- classical victimology (or any other kind of 'pure' theory)
- corporate crime
- compensation for victims
Other than that there's not a lot to say in this first week, except
- do read; the more you read for this unit the more you'll get out of it
- do read "The Ideal Victim" in particular; it's an easy read but there's a lot in there
- do start thinking about real-life examples of victims of crime, for the first essay
- do read "The Ideal Victim" (I know I've said this once already, but I would seriously recommend reading it twice - perhaps once straight through and once taking notes)
- do ask if there's anything you don't understand; and
- don't panic!
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