Week 3: The Ideal Victim

This week we looked at Nils Christie's paper "The Ideal Victim".

I'm not going to talk here about the model of the 'ideal victim' and how it's put together - that's all in the lecture (and on the slides), and the paper itself is easy enough to read. What I'm going to focus on is the purpose of the model, and how it links up with critical perspectives on victims of crime - perspectives like those of feminist and radical victimology.

As you know, Christie argues that we have a lot of preconceptions about what a victim ought to be like. The result is that we give actual victims of crime more or less recognition, take them more or less seriously, depending on how closely they fit the model of the 'ideal victim'. The more vulnerable and innocent the victim is, essentially, the easier it is to see them as a victim; if we want people to take somebody seriously as a victim, we will tend to emphasise how weak they are and how virtuously they were acting at the time of the crime. This makes it possible to draw a nice clear line between the victim (weak, innocent and one of us) and the offender ("a dangerous man coming from far away" in Christie's words).

Thinking about some of the (real and fictional) examples we've looked at so far, and about your own knowledge of crime, I hope you'll agree that the "weak innocent victim"/"big bad stranger" model is very far from being typical of actual crimes; most victims aren't whiter-than-white in their conduct (why should they be?) and most offenders aren't predatory strangers. So the 'ideal victim' makes it harder to see actual victims of crime, and actual offenders, for what they are. (Christie doesn't leave it there - he goes on to suggest that the 'ideal victim' will always cloud our thinking about victims, so perhaps we should get away from labelling people as victims at all. We'll come back to this argument later in the unit, but we need to put it on one side for the time being.)

For now - and looking ahead to the first essay - there are two points to bear in mind. Firstly, Christie didn't make up the 'ideal victim': there's a lot of pressure in society to concentrate on people who live up to the model of the 'ideal victim' (from the government, from the media, from our own prejudices). Secondly, there are lots of victims of crime who don't live up to that model, and consequently don't get much sympathy or support.

Without doing any reading about criminological theory*, what relation do you think there might be between those two points and a feminist approach to victimology? Or a radical left-wing approach?

*Unless you have done already.