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:

• 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)

It's rare for individual failings - one person's incompetence or corruption - to have a major effect on victims of crime. Institutional bias is much more common in stories of victims being let down by the system; radical victimology and feminist victimology are both good ways of looking at forms of institutional bias. Structural failings are harder to identify and more debatable, but there are certainly some cases where we can say that a victim of crime has suffered as a result of the system doing what the system does.

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'?

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%

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.