Victims and Restorative Justice

Inge Vanfraechem, Daniela Bolívar Fernández, Ivo Aertsen, Inge Vanfraechem, Daniela Bolívar Fernández, Ivo Aertsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415810661
• eBook ISBN: 9781135092900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Restorative justice aims to address the consequences of crime by encouraging victims and offenders to communicate and discuss the harm caused by the crime that has been committed. In the majority of cases, restorative justice is facilitated by direct and indirect dialogue between victims and offenders, but it also includes support networks and sometimes involves professionals such as police, lawyers, social workers or prosecutors and judges.

In theory, the victim is a core participant in restorative justice and the restoration of the harm is a first concern. In practice, questions arise as to whether the victim is actively involved in the process, what restoration may entail, whether there is a risk of secondary victimisation and whether the victim is truly at the heart of the restorative response, or whether the offender remains the focal point of attention.

Using a combination of victimological literature and empirical data from a European research project, this book considers the role and the position of the victim in restorative justice practices, focusing on legislative, organisational and institutional frameworks of victim-offender mediation and conferencing programmes at a national and local level, as well as the victims' personal needs and experiences. The findings are essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of justice, victimology and law. The publication will also be valuable to policymakers and professionals such as social workers, lawyers and mediators.

Part I Victims in restorative justice literature

1 Victims' victimization experiences and their need for justice

Antony Pemberton and Inge Vanfraechem

DOI: 10.4324/9780203070826-2

Introduction

Recent decades have seen an increasing academic, policy and advocacy interest in victims of crime. ¹ These victims may have been the forgotten party of the criminal justice system in the 1970s; today – at least in public discourse – victims of crime seem to be ubiquitous. Hardly a day goes by without news, legislative proposals or new research findings.

One feature qualitatively differentiates the experience of crime from other forms of harm_ it is the inherent injustice and wrongfulness of criminal victimization (Feinberg, 1970; Fattah, 1991; Duff, 2001, 2003). The injustice suffered impacts the harms experienced by victims of crime in both a quantitative (the injustice increases the ill-effects of the harm) and/or a qualitative (the injustice changes the experience or the desired response) sense. Also the rationale behind the public nature of victimization by crime is different: victimization by crime is not solely a private matter, but involves the state and its actors as well, with criminal law concerning itself with wrongful acts (Duff, 2003; Robinson and Darley, 2007). Victims of crime, unlike victims of non-criminal acts, are confronted with a response that includes the criminal justice system and its actors (e.g. Shapland, Wilmore and Duff, 1985; Wemmers, 1996).

This chapter provides an overview of experiences of victims of crime, with an emphasis on the aspects relating to justice. This means that, although we discuss elements that crime victims share with victims of disaster, accidents and other misfortune, our main concern is with those that are more peculiar for victims of crime: its wrongfulness, the needs relating to the interaction with the criminal justice system and issues concerning the translation of victims’ needs and interests into rights within the criminal justice process.

We embark on this endeavour in full awareness of the fact that necessary generalizations should as a rule be supplied with many caveats, which the space of this chapter does not always allow, while acknowledging the challenges the fragmented nature of the field of victims’ studies poses. This chapter is culled from bodies of theory and empirical research that are in many ways isolated from each other, even though their subject matter overlaps to a substantial degree. Although we find an interdisciplinary approach an important route to gain further insight into our topic, we stress the complexities that lurk within it: construct drift, the limited ‘portability’ of findings and the risk of getting lost in translation (e.g. Clamp and Doak, 2012; Daly, 2014).

Victims of crime: key notions

The reality and the social construction of victimization

In his book Random violence: how we talk about new crimes and new victims, Joel Best (1999) analyses the patterned way in which new victims and new crimes are framed in public discourse, by news outlets and advocacy organizations. According to Best, this pattern is visible irrespective of the evidence base and it applies in similar fashion to reports concerning victims of stalking or of alien abduction. The pattern consists of the following elements. (1) Victimization is widespread and consequential. The case for attention to a group of victims is made first through the extent of suffering. This applies to the number of victims, which are either large or at least larger than most people would think (see the following point), but especially to the impact of individual instances of victimization. (2) Victimization often goes unrecognized; awareness of victimization should be improved. The widespread and consequential nature of the problem is contrasted with a lack of recognition for those bearing the brunt of it. A key issue in victim advocacy is raising awareness of the size and impact of the problem, which includes teaching victims and others to recognize their own victimization. (3) There are qualms with the label victim. A recurrent point of discussion is the name by which those suffering victimization should be called. The connotations of the word victim are often a bone of contention, for instance the helplessness associated with victim. Other words, for instance survivor, may be more appropriate. (4) The relationship between victims and victimizers is straightforward and unambiguous. The roles of victims and victimizers in the definition of new victims are clear-cut: the victimizer intentionally exploits the victim to his own gain, while the victim is blameless for what happened.

The latter point – the straightforward and unambiguous relationship – is key for the social problem in question to be fully understood as a crime, and its victims as crime victims. In this regard, Nils Christie (1986) coined the phrase ‘ideal victim’. Briefly, Christie described the ideal victim along the following lines (see also Dignan, 2005): the victim is weak in relation to the offender; the ‘ideal victim’ is likely to be either female, sick, very old or very young (or a combination of these); the victim is, if not acting virtuously, then at least going about their legitimate, ordinary everyday business; the victim is blameless for what happened; the victim is unrelated to and does not know the ‘stranger’ who has committed the offence; and the offender is unambiguously big and bad. And indeed Christie’s ‘little old lady’ and her victimizer fit the mould well.

However we should note that Christie’s ideal victim and the big, bad stranger (see also Roy Baumeister’s (1997) notion of the Myth of Pure Evil) is not the only stereotypical dyad that fits this mould. One of us has observed that other stereotypes are possible as long as they offer the same straightforward and unambiguous moral and causal analysis of crime and victimization (Pemberton, 2014a). Of particular note is the stereotype employed by the ‘violence against women’ movement, which was initially pitted against the ideal victim stereotype and in particular its depiction of the victim and victimizer as strangers of each other. Here the dyad is a combination of a survivor, a woman who has experienced repetitive violence by the hands of a man, and an intimate terrorist (Johnson, 1995) whose violence serves control and patriarchy (e.g. Hoyle, 2007). In both instances, maybe more so in the former than in the latter, this social construction of victimization (Best, 2008) distorts the reality of criminal victimization in two key ways: it makes it more difficult to consider victims that do not fit the stereotypical description as such, while at the same time reducing the empirical and moral complexity of many situations of victimization.

Indeed, most victims do not fit the stereotype. A majority of violent crime victims are young males who are acquainted with the offender, while the most prevalent form of violence in the family – although not necessarily the most prevalent forms within the criminal justice system (Graham-Kevan and Archer, 2003) – is relatively minor, one-off violence, with men and women falling victim in equal measure (Fattah, 1991; Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Laub, 1997; Felson, 2002a). In fact most victimization is not violent at all: the lion’s share of victimization concerns property crime (Felson, 2002b). These patterns can be explained through lifestyle exposure/routine activity theory (Felson, 2002b): young men more often find themselves and/or do not avoid places and situations in which the risk of victimization is more pronounced, for instance going out at night, spending time in bars and public places and drinking. Some elements such as the area of residence, race and status influence rates as well: the risk of crime rises for those living in urban areas, especially lower-status areas, and for ethnic minorities (Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Fattah, 1997a; van Dijk, 1997). Race explicitly plays a role in hate crimes, which are committed because of some hatred directed at a certain characteristic of the victim (Garofalo, 1997; Spalek, 2006).

In contrast with the stark black and white, ‘victim versus offender’ narrative, victims and offenders share many characteristics and there is considerable overlap between the two populations (Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Fattah, 1997b), even within one criminal event. In the so-called ‘escalation sequence’ that can be observed in much public violence, ‘typically the police take the winner of the fight to jail and the loser to hospital’ (Felson, 2002b, p. 24). Common couple violence between spouses is bi-directional (Johnson, 1995). On the one hand, victims may become offenders, for instance when they engage in ‘compensatory crime’ (Wemmers, 1996, p. 24) where victims feel entitled to commit a subsequent crime themselves (a phenomenon that is particularly true for the crime of bicycle theft among student populations in the Netherlands). Experiencing child abuse in the family leads to higher levels of perpetration of violence inside and outside the home (e.g. Lahlah, Van der Knaap and Bogaerts, 2013). On the other hand, offenders are exposed to high levels of risk of victimization: this is true in the community, but maybe even more so once they are incarcerated (e.g. Beck and Johnson, 2012).

Indirect, secondary, tertiary and repeat victims

Indirect victimization occurs when family and friends, even the broader society is affected by the crime committed. This indirect victimization is closely linked to the fear of crime (Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Wemmers, 1996): when others are affected by the crime, the fear of crime may rise since being exposed to information about crimes confronts people with the fact that it may occur to them as well. Research shows that people with a lesser chance of victimization generally have a higher fear rate, such as women and elderly people (Mawby and Walklate, 1994; Goodey, 2005).

Victims may be affected by the crime itself (primary victimization) or by the reactions of others, mostly family and friends or the judicial system (secondary victimization). Support by the social network generally leads to a better coping with the crime, while negative reactions can have a detrimental effect on the victim (see also Condry, 2010). Secondary victimization by the judicial system generally leads to a decrease in cooperation by the victim with the justice system (Wemmers, 1996). Secondary victimization by the justice system applies particularly to vulnerable groups, such as migrants, minorities and victi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epigraph
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Part I Victims in restorative justice literature
• Part II Victims in mediation and conferencing
• Part III Victims and restoration in policy-making
• Index