Victims of Crime

Matthew Hall

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415628099
• eBook ISBN: 9781134024223
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last thirty years, victims of crime have become a staple topic of media interest and policy-making discourse.Drawing on an extensive programme of first-hand empirical data gathered at some 300 English criminal trials, this book examines the practical outcomes of this reform agenda and assesses the meaning, implications and impact of the government's pledge to put victims 'at the heart' of the criminal justice system.The study also draws on in-depth interviews with barristers and solicitors, as well as court administrators and other Local Criminal Justice Board members. The book delves into the policy-making process behind these reforms, based on interviews conducted at key government departments, and offers a model for what a genuinely 'victim centred' criminal justice system might look like in the twenty-first century, drawing on the psychological and sociological literature on narrative responses to traumatic events.

Chapter 1

Victims, victimology and policy-making

My government will put victims at the heart of the criminal justice system. (Queen’s Speech of 15 November 2006)

By the time Tony Blair’s New Labour government was setting out its policy on victims of crime in such stark tones at the end of 2006, victims had already undergone a radical metamorphosis from the ‘forgotten man of the criminal justice system’ (Shapland et al. 1985) to the subjects of extensive official attention and legislative change. Indeed, by this point, the pledge to put victims ‘at the heart’ of the system, and to achieve ‘victim-centred’ criminal justice, was itself well established in official policy rhetoric. The pledge had already appeared in multiple policy documents, including the seminal 2002 White Paper Justice for all (Home Office 2002). In the years that followed, victims of crime have remained a topical and pervasive issue for politicians, policy-makers, the media and academics in the twenty-first century.

Researching victims

Initial planning for the research set out in this volume began in 2003, shortly after the summer publication of the government’s ‘New Deal’ strategy to deliver improved services to victims and witnesses (Home Office 2003a). By this point, victimology was already a well-established (if somewhat diverse) (sub)discipline with its own journal – the International Review of Victimology – and associated debates and conjecture. Nevertheless, as the initial research and the review of literature and policy developments continued, clear gaps were uncovered in our present state of knowledge. In short form, the reviews exposed a marked absence of up-to-date, first-hand empirical data on the position of victims during the most symbolically powerful component of the criminal justice process, the criminal trial itself (Tyler 1990). Furthermore, the pace of change in this area indicated the need for a re-evaluation of the policy situation: especially one which took account of wider, international and societal factors beyond the United Kingdom. Few studies had combined the political and policy-making side of the victims issue with questions about that policy’s practical implementation thus far in the context of local criminal justice areas and individual courts. Indeed, few commentators had questioned directly what a genuinely victim-centred criminal justice system (CJS) might look like in practice at all.

Following the above observations, the goal of this book is to examine New Labour’s pledge to put victims of crime at the heart of the criminal justice system in England and Wales. The central questions to be addressed are:

1 What would it mean to have a victim-centred criminal justice system?

2 What factors have driven this ‘policy’?

3 What has putting victims ‘at the heart’ of the system meant so far in practice?

Drawing on ethnographic techniques – including courtroom observation, qualitative interviews and surveys – the research discussed in this book was particularly concerned with the place of victims in criminal trials. It will demonstrate that while much has been done to assist victims throughout the criminal justice system in a practical sense, cultural barriers and the practices of lawyers, advocates, benches and court staff have not caught up with these good intentions. It is further argued that this ‘policy’ is in fact driven by a multitude of goals and political pressures, not all of which are conducive to victims’ needs. Broadly speaking, this has resulted in central government relinquishing responsibility for victims in favour of local implementers, without the necessary financial backing. The study concludes by proposing a model of victim-centred criminal justice, which emphasises a victim’s ability to construct a ‘narrative’ during the trial process and thereby derive therapeutic outcomes.

Victims in academia and politics

It is conventional in most writings in this area to begin with a discussion on how victims became the focus of such widespread academic and political attention. Rock (2007) rightly points out the complexity of this exercise given the divergence of opinion among scholars on the exact foundations/founders of victimology. Kearon and Godfrey (2007) similarly warn against the academic tendency to ‘force social phenomena into false chronologies’ (p. 30). As such, it is perhaps more accurate to say that this chapter provides one overview of the development of the academic (sub)discipline of victimology. It will then move on to introduce and critique existing research on the proliferation of victims within policy-making circles, this being an even more contested issue and a key focus of this research.

Victimology and conceptions of crime victims

The advent of modern victimology came in two waves. The origins of the discipline trace back to Von Hentig’s (1948) arguments against clear-cut distinctions between victims and offenders. Von Hentig suggested that individuals could be prone to victimisation, and even precipitated it through lifestyle choices. The term ‘victimology’¹ is usually attributed to Frederick Wertham (1949) or sometimes to Benjamin Mendelsohn (Kirchhoff 1994). The early victimologists continued these ‘precipitation’ debates up to the late 1950s and early 1960s (Mendelsohn 1956; Wolfgang 1958; Amir 1971; Fattah 1992). At this point, Schneider (1991) argues that victimology was set off in two directions, as a discipline concerned with human rights, and also as a subdiscipline of criminology concerned specifically with victims of crime.

The second victimological wave originated from the United States in the late 1960s. Pointing and Maguire (1988) discuss how the ‘victims movement’ in the USA was driven by a host of ‘strange bedfellows’ concerned with different aspects of victimisation ranging from feminists² and mental health practitioners to survivors of Nazi concentration camps (see Young 1997).³ Victimology was therefore very much an international development, and while US (and, later, British) victim surveys revealed new details about crime victims (Mawby and Walklate 1994), Heidensohn (1991) also notes the role played by the European women’s movement. The United Nations also drew attention to victims (Joutsen 1989) and various international meetings were hosted on the topic by the Council of Europe and HEUNI throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Mawby and Walklate 1994).

Certainly in its earlier years, victimology was far from a unified discipline. Maguire and Shapland (1997) note how victim groups in the United States adopted aggressive, political strategies emphasising victim rights, while the European schemes emphasised service provision. The 1970s saw disputes arise between those victimologists who focused on the provision of services to victims, and those interested in broader research-driven victimology (Van Dijk 1997). Conflict also arose between ‘penal victimology’ – focused on criminal victimisation and scientific methods – and ‘general victimology’ encompassing wider victimisations, including natural disasters and war (Cressey 1986; Spalek 2006). Broadly speaking, research-driven penal victimology characterised much of this early work.

As the view gradually developed that victims of crime were being neglected by the criminal justice system – and perhaps for political reasons (Elias 1986) – the study of crime victims took centre stage (Maguire 1991).⁴ In a seminal contribution, Nils Christie (1977) argued that conflicts had been monopolised by the state:

[T]he party that is represented by the state, namely the victim, is so thoroughly represented that she or he for most of the proceedings is pushed completely out of the arena, reduced to the triggerer-off of the whole thing. (p. 5)

Such views have led many recent commentators to propose alternative justice models, often based on restorative justice principles (Dignan and Cavadino 1996; Dignan 2002a, 2002b; Braithwaite and Parker 1999; Young 2000). For Dignan (2005) this is because policies and practice relating to victims of crime within the criminal justice system have led only to their ‘partial enfranchisement’ at best within that process.

Conceiving ‘victimhood’

Generally speaking, the concept of ‘victimhood’ as understood by academics has gradually expanded along with the subdiscipline of victimology itself and its recent focus on those affected by crime. That said, recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the pace of this expansion, to the point that the victim is now described by Kearon and Godfrey as a ‘fragmented actor’ (2007: 31). Clearly there has been a marked change in the two decades since Christie (1986) famously argued that only certain stereotypically ideal victims achieve victim status in the public’s eye or in the criminal justice system. Characteristics then attributed by Christie to the ideal victim include: being weak; carrying out a ‘respectable project’; being free of blame; and being a stranger to a ‘big and bad’ offender. To be labelled as a bona fide victim Christie argued that one must first conform to this ideal and then ‘make your case known’ to the justice system. The presumption that ‘real victims’ necessarily become involved with the justice system has led to the victim’s role often being shrouded in that of the witness giving evidence in court, which will be discussed in Chapter 3. This is problematic, given that the majority of crime probably goes unreported and most victims therefore never come into contact with the criminal justice system (Maguire 2002). As such, Jackson (2004) has argued that much of the victim policy at present is actually focused on a relatively small group of (mainly vulnerable and intimidated) witnesses rather than victims per se.

Elias (1983, 1986) and Rock (1990) draw on similar arguments to suggest that society’s narrow conception of victimisation is brought about by selective definitions of crime construed for political purposes. While this may oversimplify the complex interaction of social processes which leads to an activity being labelled as deviant,⁵ the point remains very significant in the context of any attempt to understand the driving forces behind victim policies. Such arguments led to the development of so-called ‘radical victimology’ which expanded notions of victimhood to include ‘real, complex, contradictory and often politically inconvenient victims of crime’ (Kearon and Godfrey 2007: 31). For example, it is now known that there is considerable overlap between victims and offenders (Hough 1986; Dignan 2005). We have also recognised ‘indirect’ victims, including the friends and family of ‘primary’ victims and the bereaved survivors of homicide (Rock 1998). Of particular relevance has been the growing appreciation for the problem of ‘secondary victimisation’, the notion that poor treatment within the criminal justice system may constitute a revictimisation (Pointing and Maguire 1988: 11). Such ideas have contributed to the recent emphasis on recasting victims as the consumers of the criminal justice process (Zauberman 2002; Tapley 2002).

Victims as state policy

As with the development of victimology itself, several attempts have been made to identify driving forces behind the renewed policy interest in victims of crime. In an early examination, Van Dijk (1983) categorises reforms intended to ‘do something’ for victims into four victimogogic ideologies. The label ‘victimogogic’ was intended to distinguish such measures from victimology’s wider goals of counting and gathering information on crime victims.⁶ For Van Dijk (1983), victimogogic measures can be based firstly on a care ideology, emphasising welfare principles. Policies can also fall under a resocialisation or rehabilitation banner, with offender-based goals. The third victimogogic ideology is the retributive or criminal justice model, stressing just deserts. Finally, the radical or anti-criminal justice ideology involves resolving problems without resorting to the formal criminal justice system. Van Dijk also notes two broad dimensions to victimogogic measures, which remain valid in the recent policy context. The first is the extent to which victims’ problems are incorporated as factors to consider within the criminal justice process. The second dimension is the extent to which victims’ interests are goals in their own right, or whether they are intended to feed back into decision-making regarding offenders.

Examining why victims have become a significant policy issue clearly affords insight into the limits of such policies. Nevertheless, Van Dijk’s construction is restricted to an examination of political ideologies. As such, he does not discuss the wider network of factors – including international influences or social issues like race and secularisation – that may lead to different policies being put into operation.⁷

Robert Elias has argued that victimogogic policies in the USA were actually a tool to facilitate state control:

[V]ictims may function to bolster state legitimacy, to gain political mileage, and to enhance social control. (Elias 1986: 231)

The argument is that politicians use victims as political ammunition in elections, and later to insist on increasingly punitive measures. Hence, Fattah (1992) characterises victimogogic measures as ‘political and judicial placebos’ (p. xii).

Both Elias and Fattah therefore look more closely at the driving force(s) behind such ideologies, which takes our understanding forward. Nevertheless, the concentration on punitiveness may distract attention from a still wider range of influences, that might help us understand why political mileage can be gained through the appearance of supporting crime victims in the first place.⁸

In a series of publications, Paul Rock charts the development of victim policy initiatives in Britain and Canada (Rock 1986, 1990, 1993, 1998, 2004). A recurring theme throughout these studies is the lack of any unified or consistent policy. Rather, says Rock, the appearance of a unified victims strategy only develops retrospectively:

[P]olicies for victims sometimes seemed to have little directly to do with the expressed needs of victims themselves and more to do with other politics. And they attain meaning only within the larger framework which those politics set. (Rock 1990: 38)

In a recent instalment, Rock (2004) examines the pressures leading to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill.⁹ A number of influencing factors are discussed, including: consumer-orientated thinking; human rights issues; international developments; vulnerable and intimidated witnesses; the development of reparation processes¹⁰ and the Macpherson Report. In Rock’s view, while making victims a party to criminal proceedings was ruled out by 2003, such influences assured that ‘notions of victims’ rights never disappeared’ (Rock 2004: 570). To escape this impasse, Rock argues that politicians and policy-makers compromised by introducing statutory service standards for victims¹¹ and witnesses backed by the Parliamentary Commissioner:

[T]hey [victims] were never to be recognized fully as formal participants in criminal proceedings, their eventual standing was to be resolved by a clever finesse of the problem of rights that ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Victims, victimology and policy-making
• 2 Victims in criminal justice: rights, services and vulnerability
• 3 Victims of crime: a policy chain?
• 4 A narrative-based model of victim-centredness in criminal trials
• 5 Victims in criminal trials: victims at court
• 6 Victims in criminal trials: the trial itself
• 7 Victims ‘at the heart’ of criminal justice: a discussion
• References
• Index