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.