Week 10

This week we looked at youth and age, with a bit of help from Jo Brand. (If you missed the seminar, you missed a good one. Short, too.)

Age is an interesting area for victimology. Few people would say that children or elderly people are an oppressed or disadvantaged group in society: we find it easy to think about social power and privilege in terms of class, ethnicity, gender and so on, but less so in terms of age. Nevertheless, the insights of radical victimology seem to apply quite well to both the old and the young ends of the age spectrum. Old people and young people are excluded from 'mainstream' society, both through actual segregation and by pervasive social norms. This exclusion makes them more vulnerable to actual victimisation: children in schools and children's homes are at risk of violence from one another and abuse from responsible adults; elderly people suffer from fearful isolation at home and from degrading loss of individuality and dignity in 'total institutions' such as nursing homes, to say nothing of their vulnerability to crime in both settings. Exclusion from the mainstream also makes it more difficult for both children and old people to make a credible claim to victimhood: old people claiming to have been mistreated may simply be cantankerous and confused; getting beaten up and robbed is just one of those things that happens, when the victim is a child and the offender is the 'school bully'. Neither young people nor old people are generally seen as victims worth our attention, albeit for different reasons: old people are so completely powerless that they tend to be ignored and drop off the 'victimhood' radar altogether, while young people are routinely assumed to be offenders rather than victims.

In both cases, the structural power in society of people like us - adults of working age - does an injustice to the minority defined as 'too young' or 'too old': it is this pervasive injustice that finds expression in greater vulnerability to crime, and in reduced visibility as a victim. That's what a radical victimologist might say, anyway.