Victims

Trauma, testimony and justice

Ross McGarry, Sandra Walklate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415856331
• eBook ISBN: 9781135005825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of victims of crime is a central concern for criminologists around the world. In recent years, some victimologists have become increasingly engaged in positivist debates on the differences between victims and non-victims, how these differences can be measured and what could be done to improve the victims' experience of the criminal justice system. Written by experts in the field, this book embraces a much wider understanding of social harms and asks which victims' voices are heard and why.McGarry and Walklate break new ground with this innovative and accessible book; it offers a broad discussion of social harms, the role of the victim in society and the inter-relationship between trauma, testimony and justice and asks:

• 
  
  

• how has harm been understood and under what circumstances have those harms been recognised?

• 
  
  

• how and under what circumstances are those harms articulated?

• 
  
  

• how and under what circumstances are the voices of those who have been harmed listened to?

Each chapter draws on case studies and a range of questions designed to assist in reflection and critical engagement. This book is perfect reading for students taking courses on victimology, victims and society, victims' rights and criminal justice.

Chapter 1

Exploring the concept of ‘victim’

Introduction

The Oxford Dictionary of English offers several interpretations of the word victim:

A person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action: (for example) victims of domestic violence / earthquake victims.

A person who is tricked or duped: (for example) the victim of a hoax.

A person who has come to feel helpless and passive in the face of misfortune or ill-treatment: (for example, a victim might say) I saw myself as a victim.

Soanes and Stevenson (2005: 1963) add to this by including ‘A living creature killed as a religious sacrifice’.

From this list it is already possible to discern a number of key, taken for granted, characteristics associated with being a victim. By definition a victim is someone who has suffered (suffering that in itself can be multidimensional and multifaceted), sometimes willingly, sometimes not, as a result of forces more powerful than themselves. Thus suffering, power relations and choice are central to how we understand who is, and who is not, given the label ‘victim’ and, as a consequence, who acquires or does not acquire victim status. Victimhood is therefore highly contested. It is also important to note that when the word victim is gendered, as in French for example, it becomes inextricably linked with being female. Historically, feminists have consequently objected to the use of this term since it implies that the passivity and powerlessness linked with it are also, by implication, associated with being female. Their preference for the term survivor over victim, and the ideological differences that the adoption of this implies, has resulted in some tensions between feminism and victim-oriented work. Viewed contemporarily, these tensions now appear a little sterile since much recent empirical work points to the value of understanding that being a victim or a survivor are, at a minimum, part of a process (see, for example, Walklate, 2011). In any event, it is the case that an either/or approach to victimhood suggests a rather static, uniform and unifying use of the term victim (or survivor) not borne out by empirical reality.

Dignan (2005) and Furedi (2013) have also indicated that the term victim has only recently become commonly used and intertwined with crime. The more common usage, as illustrated by the dictionary definitions above, is more general and connotes individuals who have experienced misfortune through no fault of their own. Indeed it is important to note that technically, in any criminal justice system, talking of ‘victims’ is highly problematic given that in such a context it is more usual to refer to complainants. Legally the terms victim and offender are deemed inappropriate since using them potentially assigns guilt and/or innocence to participants in a process in which the outcome has yet to be determined. Such issues notwithstanding, Strobl (2010: 6) suggests four analytical possibilities in the construction of victimhood: the actual victim (someone seen by themselves and others as a victim), the non-victim (not recognised as a victim by themselves or others), the rejected victim (seen by themselves as a victim but not by others), and the designated victim (regarded by others as a victim but not by themselves). So in addition to presumptions of suffering, power relations, choice and gender (as implied by the feminist intervention), Strobl’s categorisation centres the importance of process: who is and who is not recognised as a victim, how this happens, and who is involved in this process. By implication, focusing attention on processes of recognition of victimhood implicitly connects how victim status is understood and articulated, or not, in policy.

In this first chapter we explore the different ways in which the contested nature of the concept of ‘victim’ alluded to above has been expressed within the sub-discipline of victimology. We consider the strengths and weaknesses of the different perspectives to be found there, the claims they make for and about the victim, and we examine their usefulness by exploring our first case study. This presents two public inquiries: the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday and the Savile Inquiry into allegations of historical sexual abuse by the late celebrity Jimmy Savile. In considering these different perspectives in this way it is important to note two things. The influence of each of the perspectives within victimology is variable over and through time. In addition, as debates within victimology have ebbed and flowed, they have paralleled, though not always connected with, developments within the policy sphere addressing the victim of crime. Over time these policy concerns have steadily risen up the policy agenda, both nationally and internationally. This chapter will also offer some comments on these interconnections. But first, how has victimology thought about the ‘victim’?

Contesting victimhood

Different commentators attribute the founding of victimology to different people, but there is some common agreement that the work of both Mendelsohn and von Hentig made a significant contribution to this field of enquiry. These men, as émigré lawyer-criminologists, were concerned, as many other intellectuals were from the late 1940s onwards, to try and make sense of the events surrounding the Second World War, particularly the Holocaust. Their interest in the victim, stemming from these wider concerns, generated two key concepts: victim precipitation and victim proneness. Emulating early criminological thought, these writers were concerned to identify what made victims different from non-victims. In order to do this they each produced victim typologies. Mendelsohn’s typology centred on the notion of culpability and asked the question: To what extent could the victim be held culpable for what had happened to them? Von Hentig’s typology centred on the notion of proneness and asked the question: To what extent did the victim possess characteristics that made them more prone to victimisation than those who were not victimised? In their different ways each of these typologies implicitly dealt with the issue of choice: the extent to which the victim had made or not made a choice in relation to what had happened to them. As has been argued elsewhere (Walklate, 2003) choice was not the only concept implicit in each of these typologies. Both Mendelsohn and von Hentig made assumptions about the non-victim against whom the victim was to be measured.

As has already been intimated, this early work shared with criminology the desire to understand victimhood through differentiating victims from non-victims, and these differences determined the likelihood of their victimisation. In each of these typologies the non-victim was assumed to be the white, heterosexual, middle-class male. These assumptions, by implication, specified who early victimologists thought victims were most likely to be and not to be: the young, the elderly, the disabled and members of ethnic minority groups for von Hentig; those who were least culpable for what had happened to them for Mendelsohn. These assumptions in their respective ways also reflected particular understandings of vulnerability and blame. As a result, men, for example, were not assumed to be vulnerable and did not easily acquire the victim label. In addition, in taking on board notions of culpability, it is easy to see how this work, almost by definition, became occluded with the assignation of victim blaming (Antilla, 1974). Indeed it was this potential for blame that feminists were so concerned to challenge. Taken together, the implicit embrace of culpability and vulnerability within early victimological work became the mechanisms through which victims were ‘othered’ and pathologised: rendered different.

As some of the comments above imply, victimology mirrors criminology in many ways in its search for explanations, data gathering, and desire to influence the policy agenda. Also, like criminology, it draws together a heady mix of academics, activists and policymakers. This mix results in a number of tensions. Miers (1989: 17) has observed, for example, that ‘victimology has too many voices to allow any coherence in its reported understanding of the world’ and Rock (1986) has commented on its ‘catholic’ nature. Some time ago these tensions moved Fattah (1992) to call for the separation of ‘humanistic’ victimology from ‘scientific’ victimology and, as has already been noted, there has been an unhappy coexistence between victimology and feminism (see Rock, 1986; Walklate, 2007). This heady mix can produce quite different agendas for victimology which, when overlaid with the politicisation of the victim observed by Miers (1978), it can be difficult to disentangle evidence, from politics, from emotion. Here we shall take the available theoretical perspectives found within victimology as one way to begin to understand how these issues can be differently intermeshed.

Contemporarily it is possible to identify at least four competing perspectives on how to make sense of victimhood: positivist victimology, radical victimology, critical victimology and the emergent strand of cultural victimology. Coexisting, though somewhat separate from these perspectives, it is also important to note the hugely influential impact of feminist-informed work within and outwith victimology, particularly in relation to violence against women. As we shall see, each of these perspectives works with different interpretations as to the centrality of choice, suffering and power relations in their understandings of the nature of victimhood. We shall say something about each of these perspectives in turn.

Positivist victimology

Miers (1989: 3) was one of the first commentators to coin the term ‘positivist victimology’. He defined this perspective as being concerned with

the identification of factors which contribute to a non-random pattern of victimisation, a focus on interpersonal crimes of violence, and a concern to identify victims who may have contributed to their own victimisation.

Others have used different labels to draw attention to work with this kind of focus (for example, Karmen, 1990, talks of conservative victimology and Walklate, 1989, discusses conventional victimology). Whatever label is preferred, this work has, as its bedrock, concepts like victim proneness and lifestyle that have their historical roots in the work of the Founding Fathers of victimology. Empirically these concepts direct attention to the need to understand the regular patterning of criminal victimisation. This is exampled in the work of Hindelang et al. (1978), who developed a lifestyle approach to understanding exposure to criminal victimisation and operationalised this through the increasingly sophisticated refinement of the criminal victimisation survey. (Incidentally, it should be noted that the criminal victimisation survey as a method has also proved to be of significant value to those concerned with violence against women. This is discussed more fully below and alluded to in Chapter 4.) The marriage between this rather conservative conceptual agenda and the survey method centres the production of data about the regular patterning of the kind of criminal victimisation considered to be normal and routine: street crime, burglary and violence against women. Moreover, latterly it should be noted that a version of a criminal victimisation survey has been deployed to measure the nature and extent of crimes against humanity, particularly genocide (see Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, 2009). All of this activity has made its presence felt in the realm of policy. Thus it has to be said that positivist victimology is the version of victimology whose presence has had the most consistent and influential impact on policy debates in relation to a number of different aspects of criminal victimisation. Nonetheless the question remains, what does this version of victimology have to say about choice, suffering and power relations: how does positivist victimology construct and understand the victim?

Positivist victimology is underpinned by the presumption that the term ‘victim’ is itself non-problematic. The victim is given by the criminal law. This provides the framework for what is understood as the self-evident nature of suffering. Giving pre-eminence to the law in defining victimhood is the means whereby patterns of criminal victimisation can be measured not only nationally but internationally. The law then becomes the arena in which claims can be made to improve conditions for the victim. For example, John Hagan and his colleagues recognised the need for hard, quantitative data in the form of a criminal victimisation survey so that the international criminal court might be encouraged to ‘see’ the crime of genocide in Darfur (we return to his work in similarly informed ways regarding the war in Iraq in Chapter 3). However, using the law as the frame in which the victim becomes visible (or indeed remains invisible) has consequences. First the experience of the individual (their suffering) can become transposed into a threat to social order (in the recognition of their experience being criminal) and can open the door for greater punitive responses to offenders. Second, and perhaps more importantly for this discussion, is that the individual and collective voice of the victim is both silenced and co-opted into that (potentially) punitive agenda. Put simply, there is little scope here for an appreciative stance towards the victim as an individual, or a group, who has choices and makes choices. Third, taking the law as a definitional entry point for victimology belies an inherently static and functionalist view of society, with consequent implications for its understanding of power and power relationships. Thus Dignan (2005: 33) has commented that,

both the state itself, through its agencies, and also the legal and penal processes that it sanctions may themselves create new victims and also further victimize those who have already been victimized by an offender.

In this way positivist victimology contributes to the presumption that victims and offenders exist in a zero-sum relationship with one another, denying that they might overlap as experiences or indeed that there might be ‘delinquent’ victims (Miers, 2007).

In putting the potential role of the state to the fore, as well as the social reality that victims and offenders can be one and the same person, both Dignan and Miers are alluding to the consensual view of power inherent in a functionalist view of society. Such a view of society and the power relations therein restricts the vision of victimhood available to positivist victimology. This version of victimology can only reveal to us the regular patterning of criminal victimisation as given, defined and responded to by the criminal justice process. It has a very limited capacity to help us understand why the patterns take the shape and form that they do, what that looks like for the individuals concerned, and, importantly, what the patterns of victimisation that go on ‘behind our backs’ look like. Vulnerability to crime and risk from crime are given by the measured patterns of criminal victimisation. In sum, positivist victimology cannot help us understand how victims are produced and reproduced through time and space.

Radical victimology

Belying the radical potential that was clearly evident in the work of Mendelsohn (Rafter and Walklate, 2012), the origins of this strand of thought within victimology are more often than not attributed to the essay written by Quinney published in 1972. In that essay Quinney asked the provocative question: Who is the victim? Quinney (1972: 314) pointed out that ‘our conceptions of victims and victimisation are optional, discretionary and are by no means given’. Thus this version of victimology renders visible those made invisible by positivism: victims of state crime, victims of corporate crime, victims of oppression and so on: harm that goes on ‘behind our backs’. It is a perspective within victimology that takes a human-rights position, rather than a criminal-law position, in setting an agenda for its subject matter and is one that has been pursued in the work of Elias (1986) and latterly by Kauzlarich et al. (2001) and Rothe and Kauzlarich (2014). So Kauzlarich et al. (2001: 183–89) offer six propositions framing a victimology of state crime that draw on the concepts of power and suffering (for example, victims of state crime tend to be the least powerful social actors whose suffering can be neutralised or for which they can be blamed, as we go on to discuss in the forthcoming chapters). Rothe and Kauzlarich (2014) push this agenda further.

Rather than take either the criminal law, or indeed human rights as their starting point they make a case for thinking about the nature of the harm perpetrated as the entry point for victimology. The cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Exploring the concept of ‘victim’
• Part I Trauma
• Part II Testimony
• Part III Justice
• Index