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.)