There is quite a lot to say about victims of crime - there is an entire third-year unit devoted to victims and restorative justice - and in this week's teaching we could only really touch on a few important points.
Perhaps the most important point is about definitions. 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. This is where the 'ideal victim' comes in. 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 Nils Christie's formulation).
Thinking about some (real and fictional) examples of crime and victims of crime, I hope you'll agree that
the "weak innocent victim"/"big bad stranger" model is very far from
being typical. 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.
Two points. Firstly, Nils Christie wrote "The Ideal Victim", but he didn't make up the 'ideal victim' model:
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.
Thirdly (OK, three points), the 'Ideal Victim' 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
they shouldn't be asked to.
With that, the Criminology section of this unit draws to an end and I take my leave of you, at least in the role of lecturer. (For those of you who are looking ahead to doing Sociology or Criminology degrees, I'm still the overall Foundation Year tutor for the Department of Sociology; if you've got any queries about the Foundation Year or about how it's going for you, bring them to me.) I hope you've found it interesting and not excessively challenging, and that it will be good preparation for your degree course. Get that essay finished (if you haven't already), have a good break, and all the best for the rest of the year!
- Phil
