Week 5

This week we did feminist victimology, which will lead into radical victimology after ReadingEmployability Week. (Incidentally, there are no classes or lectures next week, which will leave you free to hit the Employability Fair on Monday and Tuesday.)

Feminist victimology is, for me, the point where victimology gets really interesting. Feminists were the first people to suggest that the problem of victims of crime might actually represent a problem in society as a whole. In other words, classical victimologists tended to suggest that if someone became a victim of crime it was because he was a victim ('victim-proneness') or because she had made herself a victim ('victim precipitation'). Seen in this light, victims were a problem in much the same way that beggars or drug addicts are a problem: a dysfunctional minority needing to be controlled. We might feel that someone who has been a victim of crime deserves our sympathy, but (a classical victimologist would argue) in most cases that would be mistaken: we should save our sympathy for the rare cases where a victim is genuinely innocent, genuinely virtuous, genuinely defenceless. In other words, for the "ideal victim".

Feminist victimology turns this way of looking at victims on its head. We should sympathise with victims of crime (a feminist victimologist might argue), even in cases where they seem to have brought the crime on themselves: in many cases they had no choice, no power, no alternative. Not only that, but we should also sympathise with many women who are not recognised as victims of crime: because the crime doesn't lead to a conviction, because it's not reported to the police, because it's not even recognised as being a crime. The image of the "ideal victim", seen in this light, is just an excuse for refusing to sympathise with the great majority of real victims, or to take their problems seriously.

Feminist victimology, in other words, doesn't just focus on the specific needs of women as crime victims; that would be valid and useful, but would leave the wider field of victimology unchanged. What feminist victimologists did was to suggest that the problem of victims of crime is much worse - and much more political - than classical victimologists had thought. They did this by looking at crime victimisation in terms of power and injustice, and then applying the same analysis to the process of gaining recognition as a victim. In other words, to a feminist a victim of domestic violence or spousal rape is a victim of unjust male power - and a victim who cannot gain recognition is a victim of the same gender-based injustice, operating through the criminal justice system.

Can this way of looking at crime and criminal justice be extended to other social power structures (based on class, ethnicity, sexuality...?) What do you think?

I'm not running my standard office hours next week, but I'm contactable by email any time - if you want to meet up, drop me a line on p.j.edwards at em em yoo dot ac dot uk.

Week 4

This week we looked at old-school victimology and asked whether it had any insights for us now. The key point I drew from classical victimology was that victims (i.e. most victims) were seen as different from 'us', and as being part of the problem of crime. Specifically, victims were seen as involved with 'their' offender (the 'victim-offender dyad'); as provoking the offence ('victim precipitation'); as pathological ('victim-proneness'); and as marginal (the 'subculture of violence').

We don't believe any of this any more. Or do we?

What came out when I went on to look at 'lifestyle' and 'routine activities' approaches to victimology is that ideas of victim-proneness and violent subcultures haven't entirely gone away. The difference is that victimologists don't regard anyone as pathologically 'victim-prone' any more - but some victimologists do argue that victims make themselves 'victim-prone' by behaviour that exposes them to criminal groups and dangerous situations. There is a big difference between the two: classical victimologists would say that 'victim-prone' individuals and members of a 'subculture of violence' need to be treated as a problem in their own right; 'lifestyle' victimologists would say that those people need to take greater care and stop getting into risky situations. The key assumption they share - unlike the feminist and radical schools, which we'll look at next - is that crime is a marginal problem in a functional society: society is basically OK apart from this problem of crime at the margins.

In the seminar we focused on victim precipitation and came to the conclusion that it's not very useful as a way of thinking about crime: the victim may have said or done some bad or stupid things, but the offender chose to commit the offence and is still entirely to blame for it. This is even true where the offender was previously the victim and is retaliating against years of abuse.

(Or is it? Tough one.)

Week 3

This week's lecture was all about the "Ideal Victim", Nils Christie's eccentric but hugely influential essay looking at what it takes to be recognised as a victim. (If you haven't read it yet, please read it now. It's short, it's well-written, it's thought-provoking and it's going to be relevant to most of the unit.) Although it's a short essay, there was quite a lot to get through - from mugging to marital rape to witchcraft to industrial accidents to restorative justice... - so I didn't have as much time to talk around particular topics as I would have liked. The seminar looked at the slightly different concept of the deserving victim; the reason for this was to encourage people to use their gut feelings about whether a particular victim seemed deserving or not, rather than working out the right answer from the definitions I'd given in the lecture. There were good discussions in both groups, although (once again) numbers for the 3.00 session were light-ish; if you want to transfer to that group, don't hold back.

Week 2

This week's lecture was mainly devoted to unpacking the idea of "victim of crime", showing that lots of people we sympathise with as 'victims' haven't actually been the victim of crime, and that lots of crimes take place without anyone being identifiable as a victim. The point of all this, other than sheer pedantry, is that "victim" isn't a simple concept (like 'voter' or 'student'); it's actually a heavily-loaded symbolic status, like 'traitor' or 'hero'.

So this was a ground-clearing lecture - a whole series of arguments about what a victim isn't - in preparation for the positive arguments about who we think is a victim and why, starting next week. Because it was so negative, I suspect some people may have found it a bit of a frustrating or confusing experience - I'll try and flag up what I'm doing in the lecture a bit more clearly in future. As for the seminars, there's a big difference in the size of the two groups, so anyone who wants to move from 2.00 to 3.00 can feel free to do so - although, if you want to move the other way, I'd really rather you didn't! Both sessions seemed to work OK, though, and I think they were reasonably well integrated with the lecture.

Please read "The Ideal Victim" before next Tuesday's lecture; it's on Moodle, in the Library section, under 'Essential'. Wider reading isn't vital at this stage - both the Walklate collection & the Davies & co anthology are very good, but they're background reading rather than resources for keeping up with the lectures.

One last thing - I have no idea why we've ended up with a lecture in a classroom followed by two seminar groups in lecture theatres! For group work it really isn't ideal (for lecture slides with font sizes below about 30 it isn't ideal either). On the other hand, it will be handy for those seminars when we spend most of the time watching a film (there's something to look forward to).