Week 10: Age, victimisation and victimhood

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?

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):

Whose pigs are these?
Whose pigs are these?
They are John Potts',
I can tell them by their spots,
And I found them in the vicarage garden.
- traditional

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.

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.