Week 8: How restorative justice works

So far we've looked at some of the historical roots of Restorative Justice (RJ), and at some of the key values: inclusiveness, informality, looking forwards rather than back, making amends rather than punishment of wrongdoing. But how does it actually work? What are the distinctive features of a restorative process?

RJ can take many forms, but we can identify a few key features. (NB: not every RJ initiative has all these features; some have only one or two.)

Restoration, not punishment

One of the key features of RJ in most of its forms is that it aims to 'restore' - to put things back to how they were before the crime. It 'restores' the victims of crime, enabling them to get on with their lives without being traumatised by the crime, haunted by their memories or obsessed by thoughts of vengeance. It 'restores' the offender, bringing him or her back into the social consensus about the crime that's been committed (i.e. encouraging a sense of shame and disapproval). And it 'restores' the community, reintegrating the offender and undoing any polarisation that has been created by the crime. As such it's forward-looking - as distinct from the backward-looking approach of the criminal justice system - and it's focused on making things better in future rather than on making the offender suffer.

Whether this actually means that RJ is not about punishment is another question. You could argue that 'punishment' refers to all the ways in which offenders are made to understand how bad their crime was and feel sorry for it; in this case RJ would not be an alternative to punishment at all, but an effective form of punishment.

Bringing victim and offender together
Victim-offender mediation is based on the idea that these two people, who have the greatest stake in the crime, are also best placed to resolve it. Victims can also play a key role in group-based forms of RJ. Reintegrative shaming, which is one of the key mechanisms for 'restoration', is based on an interaction in which the offender accepts responsibility for the offence and apologises, and the victim in turn accepts the apology; instead of being set aside and branded - stigmatised - as a 'criminal', the offender can then be accepted as a fellow-citizen, based on a shared denunciation of the crime.

Community problem-solving
One of the key values of RJ is deprofessionalisation, taking crimes and other 'conflicts' away from the specialists of the criminal justice system and enabling the community to resolve them, if necessary by a free-ranging discussion of what has gone on. (There's a certain amount of tension between this ideal and the use of RJ as a form of cautioning, and police-led RJ in general.) This is perhaps one of the areas where the gap between the ideal and the reality of RJ is largest: the idea of 'community' works much better in some contexts than others, and contemporary urban societies in the developed world are not the best context. It can be argued that we are all members of multiple cross-cutting communities rather than a single geographically-based one - family, friends, work, study, leisure, online - but this doesn't necessarily help. The 'community' which is supposed to be mobilised for RJ is a community which includes both the offender and the victim, which isn't necessarily going to work for these plural, non-geographical communities.

Community self-regulation
Another ideal associated with RJ, and perhaps one which has come closer to becoming a reality, is that of community self-regulation. The idea here is that local communities can be empowered to manage problematic elements within them, in the same way that businesses manage low-level white-collar crime. In this model, RJ is not a way to initiate a free-ranging discussion of the rights and wrongs of a particular crime (as in the previous model), so much as a way to bring moral pressure to bear on people who are causing disruption. This model fits very well into some current ways of thinking about neighbourhood disorder and anti-social behaviour; it's often associated with a 'pyramid' model, involving a threat of escalation to more coercive measures if the 'restorative' stage does not have the desired result.

So that's how RJ is supposed to work. But how does it actually work? For the rest of the unit we'll be looking at RJ in practice.

Week 7: Introducing restorative justice

One of the interesting things about restorative justice is the enormous range it covers. It's been argued that the restorative justice movement had three separate drivers, all of which point in slightly different directions - and none of which is necessarily victim-centred.

One driver is the idea that criminal justice should be more civil. The civil law is what gets invoked when you take someone to court. A civil court case doesn't end with anyone being found guilty and punished; generally, they end with someone being found to be in the wrong, and ordered to pay back what they owe or to pay the other person compensation ("damages"). Criminal law is backward-looking (you did X, therefore we'll punish you); civil law is forward-looking (you did X, so you need to put it right by doing Y and Z). Most importantly, the civil law doesn't inflict pain and hardship on the people it finds to be in the wrong; it treats them as a responsible individual and asks them to put things right. Restorative justice can work the same way, and reduce the number of offenders who are treated harshly - and, perhaps, reduce the number who reoffend.

Another idea, closely related to the first one, is that criminal justice should be more moral. The argument is that the punishments handed down by criminal law don't work because they're harsh - if anything, they work (when they do work) in spite of their harshness. What works - what makes offenders think twice and decide not to reoffend - is a form of punishment which treats offenders as people who have a conscience and would prefer to do the right thing. Some offenders come to the realisation that they've been doing bad things - and decide not to do them any more - in the course of a prison sentence; some don't. What if the moral message could be communicated without the harsh punishment - perhaps, even, instead of the harsh punishment? Restorative justice can do this, too: the victim can really get through to the offender, in a way that judges and social workers often can't.

Then there's the idea that criminal justice should be more communitarian: instead of handing over crimes to criminal justice professionals, we should find ways to mobilise the community as a whole to deal with the conflict represented by the crime that's been committed. If crime represents a breach in a community, perhaps criminal justice only makes matters worse - it introduces another level of separation, between the community and the convicted criminal (who ceases to be a member of the community and starts to look like an "Ideal Offender"). Restorative justice can work to mobilise communities, enabling them to condemn crimes while treating the offender with forgiveness and reintegration.

This summary raises a couple of questions. Firstly, these are three quite different things: can a single process achieve all three of them? If not, is there a single thing identifiable as 'restorative justice', or are there several different things which have that name?

Secondly, what about the victim? None of these theoretical models really focuses on the victim. However, I argued in the lecture that the victim of crime has become more central to restorative justice. The victim plays a key role in all these models - even if their role is to help the offender or the community - and I think the centrality of the victim has become more obvious since people started putting RJ into practice. The way that people think about RJ is starting to shift as well; we'll have more about that in later lectures.

If you weren't involved in the role-playing exercise we did in seminars, please have a look at the "Restorative Conference Facilitator Script" which is linked on Moodle. Here are some excerpts (there are also set questions for the victim and for anyone who has come along to support them).

Ask the offender:

• “What happened?”
• “What were you thinking about at the time?”
• “What have you thought about since the incident?”
• “Who do you think has been affected by your actions?”
• “How have they been affected?”

Ask each parent/caregiver: “This has been difficult for you, hasn’t it? Would you like to tell us about it?”

Have each respond to all of the following questions.

• “What did you think when you heard about the incident?”
• “How do you feel about what happened?”
• “What has been the hardest thing for you?”
• “What do you think are the main issues?”

Ask the offender: “Is there anything you want to say at this time?”

Picture yourself sitting around a table, after a crime has been committed, and answering questions like these - as the victim, as the offender, as an offender's 'supporters' (very often parents). How do you think they would make you feel? Do you think the victim would find the process useful or satisfactory?

One final thought: what would it be like to go into a restorative justice process if you weren't actually guilty but had admitted guilt for tactical reasons, e.g. because you believed you'd be treated more harshly if you went to court? Would your innocence be found out?

Week 4: Victim Support

We've devoted quite a lot of attention to things that victims need (but aren't getting) and problems with the criminal justice system. This week, for a change, we looked at one of the positive features of the system and described how it actually does give victims something they need.

Victim Support is a charity, albeit one with fairly reliable funding from local crime budgets; it's probably best considered as a semi-detached part of the criminal justice system. It has a public face which campaigns for a better deal for victims, but it's not primarily a campaigning organisation: the bulk of what it does is simply to provide support to victims. Initially a purely voluntary organisation, Victim Support now has a substantial layer of permanent staff, but the people at the sharp end are still mainly volunteers: the organisation has something like a 1:4 staff:volunteer ratio. This means that Victim Support can offer a level of personal commitment and dedication which you don't always get from a government department: as a rule, people who work for Victim Support are doing it because they really want to.

Victim Support has 'core' Home Office funding, i.e. funding which isn't going to be turned off overnight; this supports its administrative superstructure and makes it possible to train and manage all those volunteers. The Victim Support budget has become more discretionary since the establishment of Police and Crime Commissioners; the budget for Victim Support in each PCC region is controlled by the PCC, and can be directed to whatever area of work the PCC thinks appropriate. Although in theory the PCC could turn off the tap, what this has meant in practice is that more funding can be given to areas of work which are particularly prominent in one area - e.g. support for victims of domestic violence or anti-social behaviour.

Victim Support does some campaigning on behalf of victims, but it campaigns in a very specific way. Unlike some groups which claim to speak on behalf of victims, Victim Support never claims that 'victims' in general want more of a particular kind of sentence (either harsher or more lenient). Victim Support's view, based on years of working with victims, is that 'victims' as a group don't have any particular view on how criminal cases should be resolved: some victims are very vindictive, some are forgiving, some don't care either way and just want to put the crime behind them.

Rights for victims within the criminal justice process are Victim Support's key campaigning priority: instead of outcome-oriented reforms, Victim Support focuses on the process. Victims may not have any views in common, but what they do have in common is the experience of being a victim and being involved in the criminal justice system. Over the years, most of Victim Support's core demands have been met to a greater or lesser degree; the only one which has clearly not been met is the universal right to compensation. The key process-based rights of respect, protection and information (giving and receiving) are now very largely respected, along with the negative right of not having responsibility for the outcome of cases.

So, where next for victims - what needs to victims have which are still not being met?

Week 5: Crime by and against business

Corporate crime, white-collar crime, crime by business is a crime of power: a type of offence that takes place against the backdrop of unequal power relations, which affect both the likelihood of becoming a victim of crime and the likelihood of gaining recognition as a victim.

Corporate crime takes many different forms. When Ken Lay of Enron, or Robert Maxwell of the Mirror group, destroyed their own businesses from within for their own benefit, that was corporate crime. When banks sold people mortgage policies that were never going to pay out adequately, or insurance policies that they were never going to be able to claim on, that was corporate crime. When a Dutch company sold Romanian horsemeat to British supermarkets and food processors under the guise of beef, that was corporate crime. All these very different examples reflect a difference of power. Businesses large and small have much more power over us than we do over them, and in some cases the power they have is exercised in unlawful ways: overcharging us, selling us sub-standard products, ordering us to work excessive hours.

Even when it takes directly life-threatening forms, corporate crime has a tendency to remain invisible - "man crushed by machinery at workplace" may be an item on the local news but it won't make the national press. Not only that, but it won't get into the crime statistics. Nobody knows how much law-breaking goes on in business. One reason for this is that business regulation - the main approach used to control commercial rule-breaking - has a strong orientation towards gaining compliance rather than prosecuting wrong-doers. Where prosecution is used, it is used as a last resort: inspectors will try to get managers to co-operate, then use the threat of prosecution to try and induce compliance. Actually taking a company to court is an implicit admission that other methods have failed, and is almost a punishment in itself.

There are good reasons for using this 'responsive', compliance-oriented approach: being treated with respect encourages managers and employees to commit themselves to the rules being enforced, rather than just treating them as a box-ticking exercise. The more punitive approach of prosecuting everything that can be prosecuted may lead to staff getting stressed and demotivated, and only caring about sticking to the rules because they're afraid they'll lose their jobs.

But even if it does produce better results, with less disruption, than a more punitive approach, there's a question-mark over the responsive approach when it comes to the victims of corporate crime. Should corporate criminals always be prosecuted for the sake of doing justice to the victims? Alternatively, is it better to implement regulation that leads to better practices being adopted, so that there are fewer victims in future?

Week 3: Compensation for victims

This unit has three main themes running through this unit. The first, encapsulated in the idea of the Ideal Victim, has to do with how we think about victims. We've seen how entrenched some assumptions about victims are, and - more importantly - how unhelpful those assumptions can be. The second has to do with the criminal justice system, and how difficult it is to fit victims into it: the victim doesn't belong on either side of the confrontation between the Crown and the offender, and often ends up, literally, serving as a witness to her own victimisation. Following on from this, the third them has to do with restorative justice, and the broader challenge of taking a victim-centred approach to crime. Actual victims - ordinary people who happen to become victims of crime - want, and need, many different things: some victims are vengeful, some are forgiving; some are knocked flat by the after-effects of the crime, some shrug it off; some want to take an active part in the prosecution of the crime, some want to put it all behind them. The only thing all victims have in common is that they want to be taken seriously, listened to (if they want to talk), given support (if they need it) - in short, treated with respect.

Last Friday's lecture involved all those three themes. As we saw, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme is explicitly designed to exclude anyone who doesn't co-operate with the police and anyone with a 'bad character' - which is to say (among other things) anyone who has served a custodial sentence of any length within the last seven years. (Hard luck if you go to prison for non-payment of debts and get beaten up a year later.) Only the innocent and virtuous need apply, in effect.

The other main form of compensation is the Compensation Order, which can be handed down by courts as part of a criminal sentence. This is a vivid illustration of the inadequacy of the criminal justice system to give victims what they need. Remember the dark figure of crime: not all crimes are reported to the police; not all of those are detected, i.e. have an offender identified; not all of those are prosecuted, and (inevitably) not all prosecutions lead to a guilty verdict. But it's only a guilty verdict that can lead to the imposition of a Compensation Order. Even when the option is available - and courts are encouraged to impose it when it is there - in practice most sentences don't include compensation, often because the offender would be unable to pay. Putting it all together, the criminal justice system can only provide compensation, in the form of a Compensation Order, for a tiny, tiny minority of victims.

Coming on to the question of respect and victim-centrality: when compensation is awarded, how much should it be? This is a difficult one. Somebody who has had a leg broken in three places, suffering permanent impairment as a result, isn't going to want to be fobbed off with a ten pound note. But suppose a more satisfactory order was made - £10,000, say. (The maximum compensation payable for this injury under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme is currently set at £4,600, incidentally.) Would accepting this level of compensation mean that you were saying the leg was worth £10,000 (or £4,600)? It's not a calculation anyone would want to make. I think we have an instinctive sense of when monetary compensation is far too low, without having a clear sense of what the right level would be. The reason is the message that it conveys - the point of a very low amount is that it conveys a lack of respect. Similarly, research has shown - perhaps surprisingly - that victims don't object to compensation payments being spread out over a long period, if there is no other way that the offender can pay. What victims do object to is not knowing how long the period will be or what the payments will be: in short, they object to being kept in the dark, treated with disrespect.

But even if the payments are scaled satisfactorily and made on time, both the main compensation schemes are wildly inadequate. Victims need respect, which may mean looking at alternatives to criminal justice; and they need support, in the form of a universal and unconditional service for victims.

And that's where we're going with the next lecture, which will be a guest lecture from Emma Golden of Victim Support. It's a real privilege to hear from somebody who's actually working with VS: be there!

Week 2: Domestic violence

The issue of domestic violence brings together some of the key issues about victimology that we have looked at so far, as well as connecting with some of the issues we'll be looking at this term.

Six (sorry!) brief points. First point: you can't talk about victims without talking about the 'dark figure'. If you want to know how many people have been victims of which crimes, nobody would suggest relying on police recorded crime figures: there are all sorts of reasons (good as well as bad) why crimes can be committed and not end up in police statistics. But all the possible alternative sources have their own issues. What the Crime Survey for England and Wales records isn't how many crimes of type X were committed, but how many people answered Yes when they were asked if they'd been a victim of crime X. This doesn't matter very much if crime X is car theft, for example, but it matters a lot in the case of domestic violence: the statement "I have been a victim of domestic violence" can mean very different things depending on who is saying it, and the victims who suffer the most may not be the ones most likely to say Yes when asked (see point 4).

Second, both victimisation and victimhood are related to power. A feminist explanation of domestic violence is that it happens when a sexist man feels his patriarchal dominance being challenged, and uses force to put his partner back in her place. The 'family violence' model of domestic violence, by contrast, relates domestic violence to the powerlessness of poor and socially excluded groups. Other researchers combine the two, arguing that men who feel powerless react violently, taking it out on their partners. The question of how to gain recognition as a victim is also closely related to power in society.

Third, crimes against women are (still) treated differently. Comic artist Alan Moore's comments on the fictional representations of rape and murder are relevant here:

From what I understand, last year there were 60,000 rapes in the UK ... I would have to say that I do not recall the sixty thousand homicides that occurred in the UK last year, possibly because – well, they didn’t, did they? Except, of course, in the pages of fiction, where I would imagine that there were considerably more violent deaths than the above-mentioned figure. It would appear that in the real world, which the great majority of people are compelled to live in, there are relatively few murders in relation to the staggering number of rapes and other crimes of sexual or gender-related violence, this being almost a complete reversal of the way that the world is represented in its movies, television shows, literature or comic-book material.

Similarly, survey figures from the 1990s suggest that 400,000 women were chronic - repeated, day after day - victims of domestic violence, and that 240,000 had been 'very frightened' by the last incident. These are staggeringly high figures. A large part of the story of contemporary victimology is the story of overlooked female victims.

Fourth, and just to complicate things: male victims are hard to deal with. Do male victims of domestic violence exist? Yes. Is domestic violence against men as serious, or as widespread, as against women? Almost certainly not. What do you do if a man makes a complaint of domestic violence (although he's not showing any visible injury) - or if a man who's been accused of beating his partner claims that he was only fighting back (and he has the bruises to prove it)? Do you treat him as a victim?

Two final points, looking ahead to the remainder of the unit. Point five: victims and criminal justice don't mix (at least, not straightforwardly). The criminal justice process struggles to find a role for victims; all too often victims are sidelined, or else exploited to justify harsh sentencing. Calling the police, and setting the criminal justice machinery in motion, may not be the best way to make the victim safe; it almost certainly won't help empower her.

And point five: restorative justice has a lot to offer. Domestic violence, one of the areas where conventional criminal justice has failed badly, is an area where restorative justice has the potential to succeed. Restorative justice puts the victim centre stage and makes it possible to tailor a justice process which meets the needs of that individual victim - and that individual offender.

Term 2, week 1: Rape and rape myths

"a female slave has ... an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to - though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him - he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations."
- John Stuart Mill (1869), The Subjection of Women

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them."
- Germaine Greer (1970), the Female Eunuch

Rape is a difficult topic to write about. On one hand, many people would agree with Mill that it is "the lowest degradation of a human being" - worse than violent assault or even torture. (You can consent to being assaulted by starting a fight (or a game of rugby); masochists even consent to being tortured. But even a masochist can't consent to rape.) On the other hand, feminists have identified rape as being part of a spectrum of male violence against women and girls - the extreme end, but it still has something in common with other parts of the spectrum, from soft porn and blonde jokes to abuse and domestic violence. (Is a blonde joke violence? We'll come back to that.)

So, from a feminist perspective, rape is at once extreme and typical - a crime which is universally denounced, but one which carries a message (men's hatred and fear of women) that is absolutely normal and everyday.

How does a male-dominated society deal with this contradiction? Essentially (feminists would argue), by denying the reality of rape: setting up a fictional version of rape and obscuring the real one. We looked at some key rape myths in the lecture. Firstly, rape is informally defined along "ideal victim"/"ideal offender" lines. A woman who is raped by a stranger in a dark alley is a real rape victim; a woman raped in her own home by her boyfriend should kick him out and be more careful in future. Secondly, rape is informally defined - and, until quite recently, was legally defined - as something that doesn't happen within a long-term relationship: it was only in 1994 that the law was changed so that a married man could be found guilty of raping his wife. Thirdly, a lot of weight is given to the man's state of mind; the myth here is that a man can only commit rape if he thinks he's committing rape, i.e. if he's certain that the woman hasn't consented. Again, this is an area where the law has changed relatively recently: until the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a man accused of rape could claim that he "honestly believed" the victim had consented, and this would be a defence against the charge. (The defendant now has to show that he had a reasonable belief in consent, which is a lot more demanding.) Lastly, when a rape case comes to court, there is what you could call a professional myth: the myth that rape can be treated in just the same as any other crime, and that justice will be done in the same way. The reality is that women reporting rape, who have had to get through a massive obstacle course in order to get to court, now face the same obstacles all over again in the form of the first three myths - which live on in the minds of the jury (and can be exploited by defence lawyers), even if they aren't supported any more by the letter of the law.

The feminist analysis is powerful. Not everyone agrees with every detail of it - for example describing everyday forms of sexism as male violence - but I think it can tell us a lot about how rape is dealt with in our society. But the feminist analysis leaves us with a question: what is to be done? How can the under-reporting, under-prosecution and under-conviction of rape charges be addressed?

Week 11: Ethnicity and victimisation

"I think we should consider the possibility that this attempted murder was a hate crime."
"What, as opposed to one of those 'I really, really like you' type of murders?"
- Life on Mars

This week's lecture took the approach of radical victimology, with its stress on power and injustice as the context for crime, and applied it to a different area: ethnicity and 'race'.

Radical victimology starts from the basis that some people hold power over others, and do so in ways that are unaccountable and unjust. Is this a useful way of thinking about ethnicity? It's certainly not true to say that every member of an ethnic minority is less powerful than every White person. Nor is it true to say that all White people would discriminate against Asians (for example) if they had the chance - any more than all Asians would discriminate against Whites.

The point is more about the relationship between prejudice and power. This country, like many others, has a long history of discrimination against ethnic minorities: fifty or a hundred years ago it would have been completely routine and unsurprising to see positions of power reserved for White people, and to see those people using their power in discriminatory ways. This is no longer normal or acceptable, but it's still there in the background - those discriminatory values and practices are part of all of our history.

Because of that history, the White majority - on the scale of society as a whole - has a power that ethnic minorities don't have: the power to discriminate, in ways that have a major effect on people's life chances. It's not a coincidence that black and minority ethnic people are significantly more likely to live in poorer areas - and, as a result, significantly more likely to become victims of crime, including 'normal' crimes with no racial motivation. What's more, there is a minority which feels threatened by equality - by the erosion of the (unjust) privilege which the White majority used to have - and wants to restore it, if necessary by violent means. Racist crimes, like violence against women, are very often crimes committed, not by people who actually have power, but by people who feel they ought to have power - and use violence to make it a reality.This is what ethnicity, and the more-or-less imaginary categories of 'race', have to do with power and injustice.

Whether it's useful to talk about racist crime in terms of 'hate crime' is another question; the police certainly think it is. Personally I'm sceptical; this is partly for the reason given by Gene Hunt, partly because I think the 'hate crime' label is too general. If members of any group can be a victim of 'hate crime', then 'hate crime' is purely about irrational prejudice - and not about power and histories of injustice. I think losing that background makes racist crime harder, not easier, to explain and to challenge.

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.

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.

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.