Week 9

This week we looked at the experience of victimisation. There were two main points here. One was that this is an area where there is enormous variation: in the ways that people experience being a victim; in the way they respond to it; in the range of experiences which make people feel like a victim in the first place; and in the resources they're able to use to deal with the situation. The crime itself may be serious or trivial; its effects may be more or less traumatic; the victim may be physically vulnerable or resilient, well-connected or isolated, on good terms with the police or socially excluded; the coping strategies the victim adopts may be positive or self-destructive; and so on. This makes it very hard to generalise about what "victimisation" is like or how "victims" feel.

The second point, which qualifies the first one, is that the experience of victimisation does have some common properties, which define what it means to be - or feel like - a victim. The effect of all the factors listed above isn't to create different experiences of victimisation, but to make the experience of victimisation more or less serious, harder or easier to deal with. To understand what this experience is and how different victims cope with it, we looked at two psychological models. Rotter's "locus of control" theory predicts that downtrodden fatalists (external locus of control) will be relatively untroubled by being a victim of crime ("s*** happens"), whereas confident self-starters (internal locus of control) will find it devastating ("how could this happen to me?") This is believable but also rather surprising - even shocking: it suggests that psychologically healthy habits of thought are actually a liability when it comes to coping with being a victim of crime.

The "ordered world" model, put forward by Janoff-Bulman and Friese, suggests why this should be. According to this model, we all (to a greater or lesser extent) carry around three guiding assumptions. In colloquial terms, they can be summed up as: "I'm going to be all right", "Things happen for a reason" and "I'm a good person". The experience of being a victim is a direct challenge to all of these, the first two most obviously but also the third - why should bad things happen to a good person? We can see how someone with a strong internal locus of control would have particularly well-developed "ordered world" beliefs, and would consequently find victimisation extremely challenging to their world-view. J.-B. and F. suggested that we cope with victimisation by addressing all three of these challenges: we move on from being a victim of crime, in effect, by telling ourselves "I'm going to be all right (the crime wasn't such a big deal)", "Things happen for a reason (I shouldn't have gone down that street/had that drink/etc)" and "I'm a good person (all the more so now that I'm taking more care)".

We discussed last week's film in the seminars. While it's not directly related to the "ordered world" model, it does relate quite strongly to the idea of rebuilding one's emotional and symbolic world; all four of the stories involved somebody who was "stuck" in the state of being a victim of crime (the murder of a loved one) and who eventually managed to move on by emotionally reframing what had happened.

(There's another film next week, but it's a short one so we'll have the discussion straight after.)

Week 8

So, classical victimology tended to blame the victim and treat victims as part of the problem of crime; the image of the "ideal victim" represented those few people who were entitled to be considered as 'true' victims, and it was a very limited and disempowering role to occupy (not real, and not really an ideal either). Feminist and radical victimology suggested that we should sympathise with victims, and that a lot of victims were going unseen: women and other oppressed or excluded groups were victims of systematic injustices within society, and suffering from crime was just part of this situation.

So far, so theoretical. We left theory behind this week and looked at some data: which groups of people are really victims of crime? (And how do we know? There are big question marks over the data from even the British Crime Survey, but it's the best we have - it's certainly much more reliable and valid than police figures.) The results were, perhaps, not very surprising: as far as the British Crime Survey can tell, people in poor neighbourhoods are the main victims of property crime; young men, and in particularly young Black men, are the main victims of street violence; and older, White, women are the 'safest' group in society.

Which theoretical perspective, if any, do you think the figures support?

Week 7

Radical victimology this week. As an approach, it's not a million miles from feminist victimology; in fact it's indebted to it. To demonstrate this I'm going to cheat slightly and borrow half of the previous blog post, with a few words changed:

We should sympathise with victims of crime (a radical 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 people who are not recognised as victims of crime: because the crime doesn't lead to a conviction (e.g. racist attacks), because it's not reported to the police (e.g. elder abuse), because it's not even recognised as being a crime (e.g. white-collar 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.

Radical victimology, in other words, doesn't just focus on the specific needs of oppressed, excluded and disempowered groups as crime victims; that would be valid and useful, but would leave the wider field of victimology unchanged. What radical 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 radical victimologist a victim of workplace injury or gay-bashing is a victim of an unjust power structure, of which the actual crime is just the 'sharp end' - and a victim who cannot gain recognition is a victim of the same structural injustice, operating through the criminal justice system.

Makes sense? It can get a bit ranty, as I said in the lecture, but I think it's a useful way of looking at victimisation and victimhood.