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 But as a whole it's very ideological and rather outdated.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.

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.

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.

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

• how victims are treated within the criminal justice system
• crimes against women
• restorative justice, in particular how RJ works in practice

and that you're not particularly bothered about

• classical victimology (or any other kind of 'pure' theory)
• corporate crime
• compensation for victims

I'll try and take all of this on board - although I'm also aware that some topics, including crimes against women and RJ, got both negative and positive votes!

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!

You can leave comments on this blog, although anything that's intended for me personally is probably better done by email.