Contemporary victimology is one of the more critical parts of criminology - and, to a large extent, older forms of victimology are what it's critical of. This week, we looked at those older ways of talking about victims.
There are three main points I want to make in this post. First, I want to stress - stop me if you've heard this one before - that the Ideal Victim is not an ideal. To explain what I mean, put yourself in the position of an insurer who doesn't want to pay out, or a compensation authority with a limited budget. If you're that insurer or compensation board, the Ideal Victim represents those people who you do want to pay, because they seem the most deserving. If you pay out to the 'ideal victim' cases and only those cases, you can save a lot of time and money but the public won't mind - it will look like you're doing your job properly. The more we think in terms of the 'Ideal Victim', the less attention we pay to all the other poor so-and-so's who are victims of crime but whose faces don't fit. A lot of contemporary victimology, including Nils Christie's essay itself, is all about paying attention to the other poor so-and-so's.
Second, a lot of classical victimology is - in academic language - highly controversial and rests on discredited assumptions. In less academic language, it's horrible. (Don't say this in your essay.) If you go back to the 1960s and 70s, you can find very respectable academic victimologists arguing that men hit their wives because their wives nag them, or that a girl who gets raped after a night out has brought it on herself. (The Accused only came out in 1988, and it was pretty controversial even then.) These arguments rest on highly discredited assumptions - in other words, they're wrong. But they represent a certain way of looking at victims - and this is where classical victimology connects up with the 'Ideal Victim'. Classical victimology uses an array of distancing devices - victims are victim-prone, i.e. they're pathologically vulnerable to crime; victims precipitate attacks on them, i.e. they're self-destructive and neurotic; victims are part of a sub-culture of violence, i.e. they're socially marginal individuals with chaotic lifestyles. Whichever way you look at it, victims - most victims - are not like us; we can reserve our sympathy for the minority of victims who fit the 'Ideal Victim' template. Classical victimology is about ignoring, or downgrading, or refusing sympathy to the majority of actual victims of crime.
Third, and finally, classical victimology did, ironically, give us some useful ways of looking at crime. Once you stop seeing victims as a problem - once you acknowledge that sympathy should be given, in principle, to all victims - the 'toolkit' of classical victimology turns out to have some quite useful things in it. We don't now call people 'victim-prone' because we think they're weird and pathologically self-destructive; nevertheless, it's a matter of sociological fact that young males are more likely to be victims of violent assault, that poorer residential areas are more likely to be high-crime areas, and so on. Maybe 'victim-proneness' is a social category, not a personal one. The idea of a 'subculture of violence', handing deviant values down from generation to generation, is seen as a bit melodramatic and stereotypical these days, but it's undeniable that some people have more violent lifestyles than others. Similarly, victim-precipitation as a way of blaming the victim is discredited, but if you take blame out of the equation and look at it as a way of understanding the sequence of events that leads up to a crime, it could be quite useful.
One other thing: when we talk about classical victimology and the Ideal Victim, we very often seem to be talking in gendered terms - the virtuous little old lady, the 'victim-offender dyad' of domestic violence, rape and victim precipitation. Why do you think this is?
Next week: feminism.
No comments:
Post a Comment