VICTIMS & VICTIMOLOGY

• DEFINING VICTIMS

  The 1985 UN Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime & Abuse of Power:

  • ‘Victims’ means persons who, individually or collectively, have suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights through acts or omissions that are in violation of criminal laws operative within Member States, including those laws proscribing criminal abuse of power

   
• DEFINING VICTIMS

  Oxford English Dictionary (2015)

  • ‘a person killed or tortured by another…a person subjected to cruelty, oppression or other harsh unfair treatment, or suffering death, ruin etc. as a result of an event, circumstance or oppressive or adverse impersonal agency’.
• THE RISE OF THE VICTIM

  • ‘long been the forgotten party in criminal justice’ (Newburn, 2017)
  • Traditionally featured in CJ process as complainants/applicants for compensation, and as witnesses, to give evidence in court, but little else
  • No support
• DEVOLOPING VICTIMOLOGY

  Positivist Victimology

  • Interested in the extent victims contributed to their own victimisation (role of victim in perpetration)
  • Victimisation and how it is related to crime patterns (prevention).

  Radical Victimology

  • Analysis of the State, its actions & lived experience of victims of crime.
  • Draws attention to crimes of the powerful and the social problems created by capitalism (highly critical of positivist victimology)   
• DEVELOPING VICTIMOLOGY

  Critical Victimology

  • Incorporates feminism into radical criminology, focus on citizenship.
  • Victims rights are a crucial basis for policy making 
• THE RISE OF THE VICTIM

  • 1940’s: Von Hentig and Mendelsohn described as the founders of Victimology – processes of victimisation, relationships between V+O’s
  • Post-WWII: Focus on victimisation and the Holocaust: Täter, Opfer, Zuschauer
  • 1960’s: Prominence of ‘moors murders’ – intense media exposure for killers and victims
  • 1980’s: Home Office funding for Victim Support
  • 1990’s: First victims’ charter, witness service, piloting of victim statements
• THE IDEAL VICTIM - NILS CHRISTIE, 1986

  • Weak in relation to offender
  • Acts virtuously (or at least going about daily business)
  • Victim as blameless
  • Victim as a stranger
  • Offender as unambiguously big and bad
  • Victim has power, influence or sympathy to elicit victim status.
• 'VICTIMS': IMAGES AND REALITIES

  IMPORTANT TO CRITICALLY ASSESS ‘Ideal Victim’ idea

  • Traditional focus on ‘conventional predatory’ crimes
  • Corporate wrong doing – victims not always aware they have been victimised
  • Secondary victimisation – what about witnesses?
  • ‘Robin Hood crimes’ – sometimes the offender is weak and disempowered
  • Overlapping of victim/offender categories…
• OFFENDERS, VICTIMS, OR BOTH? IMPLICATIONS FOR CJ?

  • Crewe, Hulley & Wright (2017) Gendered pains of imprisonment. N=21 women convicted of murder under 25, serving 15+yrs tariff.
  • ‘With extraordinary consistency, [the women in the study] described the myriad ways in which their trust had been broken or abused, generally by parents, authority figures and intimate partners, who had sexually assaulted them, abandoned them or failed to care for them in fundamental ways’.
• OFFENDERS, VICTIMS, OR BOTH? IMPLICATIONS FOR CJ?

  • ‘Experiences of sexual and physical victimization in particular result in ‘long-term cognitive, emotional and interpersonal consequences’ (Fallot and Harris 2002: 476), which play out across the adult life course
  • As Liebling (2009: 23) notes, ‘[g]iven the high levels of past abuse in women’s experience, their experiences of trust, relationships and authority in prison should be of major interest to researchers and policy-makers alike
• OFFENDERS, VICTIMS, OR BOTH? IMPLICATIONS FOR CJ?

  • ‘The tabloid verdict was that Thompson and Venables were aliens from the Planet Evil, or (no less Gothic) video-junkies mimicking Chucky Doll in Child's Play 3. The truth is more humdrum. Their family backgrounds exhibited classic "risk factors" - dysfunction, poverty, alcoholism, marital breakdown, neglect and bullying. Both boys had been held down a year at school, a humiliation which made them team up. Both resented their siblings, and may have punished James for it’.
• BUT SUCH INDIVIDUALS ARE NOTTHE BULK OF CRIME VICTIMS IN E&W

  General Trends - CSEW Evidence (2010-2015)

  • Multiple/repeat victimisation very common (2011) - 73% of DV incidents were repeat offences
  • Most victims = young males, with very similar profiles to that of offenders
  • Particularly men aged 16-20 and single
  • Cases of violent crime are relatively rare compared to household and property offences
• BUT SUCH INDIVIDUALS ARE NOTTHE BULK OF CRIME VICTIMS IN E&W

  • 2014: Victim-based crime accounted for 84% of all police recorded crime, and fell by 3% in the year ending December 2013 compared with the previous year. Within victim-based crime, there were decreases across most of the police recorded crime categories. The exceptions to this were violence against the person (up 1%), shoplifting (up 6%) and sexual offences (up 17%).
  • BUT: the CSEW does not sample corporate entities, also does not feature those under 16 and those of no fixed abode – excluded from (ideal) victim status!
• VICTIMS IN THE CJS: ISSUES AND RESPONSES 

  Vulnerability and Intimidation:

  • Some victims particularly susceptible Vulnerable due to character AND wider circumstantial reasons (including defendant)
  • CASE 1990’s: Julia Mason who was subjected to cross examination by her rapist for 6 days in the same clothes he had worn whilst attacking her.
  • Resulted in ‘Speaking up for Justice’ Report (1998)
  • Special measures implemented (Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act (1999)
  • Screening witnesses from the accused; evidence via video link; clearing the public gallery; removal of wig and gowns.
• VICTIMS IN THE CJS: ISSUES AND RESPONSES 

  Procedural Rights

  • Allowing victims more say in the CJ process (Trial)
  • Arguments against allowing victims more say include threatening D’s due process rights and undermining fairness (Ashworth 2012)
  • Might also raise their expectations and place unnecessary burden on them.
• VICTIM BLAME

  • Feminist Criminologists: Divide between deserving/undeserving victim inherently problematic
  • E.g. Rape – the way a women dresses as incitement to rape
  • Rape conviction rate will only improve when women ‘stop getting so drunk’ (Judge Mary Jane Mowat)
  • Pervasiveness of ‘victim proneness’,  culpability and lifestyle’ factors.
• VICTIM BLAME

  Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme (CICS)

  Are ‘a victim’ if: blameless, innocent, not at fault, suffer physical and mental pain due to criminal injury…

  Not ‘a victim’ if: Undeserving, blameworthy, partially blameworthy, attracted, incited precipitated injury, assault or attack…involved in excessive risk taking…
• 'NECROPOLITICS' & FEMICIDE ON THE MEXICO-US BORDER

  • 1993 – ‘dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year’ (Wright, 2011)
  • Between 1993-2003, approximately 370 women were murdered
  • At least 137 of these were sexually assaulted prior to death (Amnesty International, 2003).
• 'NECROPOLITICS' & FEMICIDE ON THE MEXICO-US BORDER

  • Here, ‘the politics of death and the politics of gender go hand in hand’
  • The women who were being killed were dismissed as rameras (whore)
  • The Govt’s refusal to take their deaths seriously exposes their discourse as one of ‘public cleansing’; ‘that while unfortunate […] the removal of [such] troublesome women restores the moral and political balance of society’ (Wright, 2011, p.713)
• MISREPORTING ALSO AN ISSUE?

  • Greer & McLaughlin (2015) argued that ‘long standing cultural taboos’ were, in part, responsible for the ‘marginalised’ nature of the UK public debate on child sexual abuse…
  • However, they also held problematic national press to account, stating that since ‘coverage of abuse continued to be shaped by the dominant news frames of ‘predatory paedophiles’, little attention was paid to more prevalent problems of institutional and familial abuse (other than ‘problem families’)’.
• OR WERE WE ALL 'IN DENIAL'?

  • Using Stan Cohen’s seminal work on ‘denial’, Greer and McLaughlin (2015) posited three reasons for the decades of institutional ‘silence, stonewalling, denial and deception’ re Jimmy Saville and CSE:

  1. Literal denial
  2. Interpretive denial
  3. implicatory denial (denial of victim legitimacy/ victim blaming here)

  • They conclude that whichever of these is accurate, ‘public denial is the main force that drives and animates an activated institutional child sexual abuse scandal’.
• RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: STUDYING HOMOPHOBIC HATE CRIME 

  Any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a personal characteristic’ (Home Office 2013)

  • Report commissioned by Stonewall surveyed more than 2500 LBGT people across Britain
  • Wide ranging abuse physical assaults, threats of violence, verbal harassment and damage to property
  • One in six LGBT people have experienced a homophobic hate crime or incident in the last 3 years
  • FoC: A quarter felt they needed to alter their behaviour to avoid being a victim
• RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: STUDYING HOMOPHOBIC HATE CRIME 

  • Non reporting: 31% of those who experienced a hate crime or incident did not report as they believed Police would not act or take seriously
  • Recording: 2/5 said incident was not recorded as a homophobic incident 
  • Support: Only ¼ referred to support group or agency
• CSE IN THE NEWS: ROTHERHAM

  context

  • Abuse took place between 1997-2013 and affected 1400 children in one town
  • Schools raised the alert over the years about children as young as 11, 12 and 13 being picked up outside schools by cars and taxis, given presents and mobile phones and taken to meet large numbers of unknown males.
• CSE IN THE NEWS: ROTHERAM

  • Children being violently raped, beaten, forced to perform sex acts in taxis and cars when they were being trafficked between towns, and serially abused by large numbers of men.
  • Many children repeatedly self-harmed and some became suicidal. They suffered family breakdown and some became homeless.
• CASE STUDY: CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION (CSE)

  • DEFINITION: CSE involves ‘exploitative situations, contexts and relationships where young people (or a third person/persons) receive ‘something’ (e.g. food, accommodation, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, affection, gifts, money) as a result of them performing and/or another or others performing on them, sexual activities
  • In all cases, those exploiting the child/young person have power over them by virtue of their age, gender, intellect, physical strength and or economic or other resources.
• According to Parton  (2015):

  ‘Approximately 1,400 children had been sexually exploited [in the Rotherham case] and that just over a third had, at some point, been known to the services because of child protection and neglect concerns. By implication the local authority had missed clear opportunities to protect these children’.

  • But WHY were these chances repeatedly missed? And to what extent might their identity as a legitimate, deserving or ‘ideal’ victim (or not, as the case may be) have been a factor in this?
• ROTHERHAM - FAILING YOUNG VICTIMS

  • Police ‘gave no priority to CSE, regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime’ (Jay, 2014)
  • Initial reports of systemic abuse of children ignored by senior officers who ‘disbelieved the data [they] contained’, and police & Social Care dismissing claims as ‘exaggerated’.
  • ‘In a small number of cases […] [children] were arrested for offences such as breach of the peace or being drunk and disorderly, with no action taken against the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault against children’ (Jay, 2014).
• ROTHERHAM – FAILING YOUNG VICTIMS

  • Too little priority’  for CSE in Rotherham, even after the Risky Business project first identified this (Jay, 2014)
  • Attitudes of professionals towards victims was to describe them as ‘undesirable’, ‘deviant’ or ‘promiscuous’ and therefore not worthy of protection.
• RISK INDICATORS

  A) Gang

  B) PTSD

  C) Trauma

  D) sexual abuse

  E) money/gifts

  F) unknown

  G) homelessness

  H) mental

  I) money

  J) sexualised

  K) presentation

  L) missing

  M) low

  N) risky

  O) substance

  P) disclosures

  Q) trafficked

  R) disorganised

  S) poor

  T) adults/ peers

  U) older male

  V) offending

  W) physical symptoms

  
• CSE: CHALLENGES FOR THE CJS

  A) Abusers

  B) criminality

  C) offending

  D) credibility

  E) offenders

  F) victims

  G) failings

  
• RECOMMENDATIONS: IMPROVING CJS FOR CSE

  • Prevention: Core consent, sex and relationships work for vulnerable young people and young people displaying controlling or abusive behaviours
  • Multi-agency work: 2012 Howard League research highlights a lack of strong partnerships responding to CSE including youth justice services.
• RECOMMENDATIONS: IMPROVING CJS FOR CSE

  • Advocacy: Understand, assess and report on offending behaviour in the context of trauma and abuse. Challenge inappropriate charges with the police and CPS 
  • March 2015: CSE to be treated as a ‘national threat’ and implementation of new measures including ‘wilful neglect’ as a crime punished by up to 5 years in prison