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.