Wednesday 28 November 2012

Week 10: Youth, age and being a victim

This week we talked about two groups of people who don't entirely fit into our usual ideas about crime and victimisation: old people and young people, including children.

The majority of people in society are adult and able-bodied, and when we think about people becoming victims of crime we tend to assume an adult, able-bodied victim. (Even the little old lady Christie presented as the archetypal "ideal victim" is living a fairly active life.) People who aren't adult and able-bodied seem to drop out of the picture when we're thinking about victims - just as they do, arguably, in a lot of other contexts.

The way we overlook old people and children has two main consequences. Firstly, it means that we overlook the types of crime which those groups are particularly likely to experience. Adults may feel intimidated by fifteen-year-old hoodies, but what age-group is most likely to suffer actual crime at the hands of a fifteen-year-old - to be robbed or harassed or beaten up for looking weird? I'll tell you now, it's not adults. Crimes committed by children against children are a real dark figure, and they're a major factor in lots of kids' lives. Elder abuse is another example: it's a crime that is not so much hidden as completely invisible, except when a particularly scandalous example comes to light.

Secondly, and I think more importantly, we don't tend to see old people or children as people in their own right, who are affected by becoming victims of crime in the same way that we would be. We may be very kind and caring in the way that we interact with them, we may be selflessly dedicated to protecting and looking after them, but we don't usually think they should have a say in what happens to them - or what's done about it when something bad happens to them.

In this sense, the way that we think about old people and children is an example of a much broader issue, which is central to contemporary victimology. This is the question of who counts - who matters in society, who has rights which are violated by crime. Classical victimology drew a line that excluded lots of scruffy, disreputable, unbalanced people, and ended up drawing the category of deserving victims very narrowly indeed. Feminist victimology came on to the scene saying that women count: women have rights which are violated by crime, and by lots of other forms of unjust male power (including within the criminal justice system). Radical victimology, in its different forms, asserts the rights of other groups which have historically been pushed to the margins. All of these ways of looking at victims say that this group counts, and members of this group should be able to say when they think they've been a victim, when they think their rights have been violated.

Is there a strand of radical victimology for children, or for old people? Is anyone out there saying that a boy being beaten up for his dinner money is just as bad as a man being mugged, or that an old woman being taunted and slapped by her daughter-in-law is just as bad as a prisoner being brutalised by prison warders?

If not, do you think there ever will be?

Why, or why not?

Wednesday 21 November 2012

Week 9: What is the reality of victimisation?

This week's lecture followed on from last week's look at crime statistics. The focus this week was on the experience of being a victim of crime, and how that can vary from one person to another. This led into a discussion of resilience: people's ability to recover from being a victim of crime and get on with their lives. We finished off by looking briefly at the process of moving on from being a victim - becoming an ex-victim, even - and how restorative justice can contribute to it.

This lecture covered quite a lot of ground! The common theme running through it is that there are things about victimisation that the statistics don't tell us: the lived experience of victims of crime doesn't get into the official picture of crime. (I'm not crazy about the term 'critical victimology', but this is the kind of point that people who call themselves critical victimologists make quite often.)
 
This argument has a number of different aspects. Here are three of them.

There are (probably) more victims than we think.

Sometimes the experience of victims of crime doesn't get into the statistics in the most basic way, because those particular crimes aren't counted. Children aren't interviewed for the British Crime Survey; parents may volunteer information about their children's experience of crime, but they won't always think of doing so, or even know about it. Something similar is true of old people, particularly old people in residential care. Sometimes the 'dark figure' of crime is very dark indeed.

In some cases it may not even be clear that a crime has been committed - at least, it may not be clear to the police or the law. In cases of workplace deaths, the Health and Safety Executive can prosecute the company involved but rarely does so. If there is no prosecution, does this mean that a crime has not been committed? If a company is prosecuted after a workplace fatality, the sentence is usually a relatively small fine; does this mean that the crime is less serious than homicide outside the workplace?

The effect of crime is (sometimes) worse than we think.

The author and accordionist Lemony Snicket defined an optimist as someone who loses an arm and says, "Well, this isn't too bad - at least nobody will ever ask me whether I am right-handed or left-handed." This level of optimism is quite rare, but it's true that some people can shrug off quite severe injuries and accidents. Others may be severely affected by minor incidents. Being hard up, out of work or lonely makes crime worse. Not fitting the profile of the 'ideal victim' can make it worse, by making people less sympathetic.

Having the same thing happen to you over and over again definitely makes it worse. Which is worse, being shouted at by the neighbour's kids or being assaulted and breaking a rib? If this is the thirtieth day in a row that those kids have shouted at you - or the fiftieth, or the hundredth - you might prefer the broken rib. But the official picture of crime has trouble incorporating this kind of factor. (There is such a concept as anti-social behaviour, but it's very hard to define and even harder to measure - counting incidents of ASB makes counting crimes look easy.)

Getting over crime is (often) harder than we think.

Crime is a disruptive, invasive event - it invades your privacy, your personal space, your safety zone. It disrupts some very important beliefs that most people carry around all the time: the belief in personal invulnerability ("I can take whatever life throws at me"); the belief in an ordered world ("Everything happens for a reason"); and the belief in a positive self-image ("I'm one of the good guys, and I will be rewarded for it"). These beliefs aren't necessarily very well-founded, but they are very psychologically healthy - they're good for getting you through the day. We know rationally that the world doesn't make sense and that lots of horrible things could happen, but we don't, usually, live our lives on that basis - you'd never get out of bed. Being a victim of crime disrupts all of these beliefs, and getting over being a victim of crime means finding a way to rebuild them.

And everyone has different ways of rebuilding the world-view which crime disrupts. One victim of assault may take weeks off sick; another may bury himself in work. The second one looks like he's been less severely affected, but is that true? One victim may talk about the crime for weeks or months afterwards, another may refuse to talk about it from day one: which one is making a better recovery? All victims are victims, whatever their coping strategy looks like: whether they're forgiving or vengeful, whether they're laid low for weeks or shrug it off straight away. Victims need lots of different things, but all victims need attention - more attention than the criminal justice system currently gives them.

Wednesday 14 November 2012

Week 8: Who are the real victims?

Over the last few weeks we've been looking at what different theories say about crime and victimisation. We've seen that there's a big difference between theories that start from the perspective that society is basically working well (classical and 'lifestyle' victimology) and theories that start from the position that society is characterised by unjust power relations (feminist and radical victimologies). For a classical victimologist, crime is a localised problem to be dealt with - or minimised - so that we can all get on with our lives. For a radical victimologist, crime is one example of much broader injustices that run through society: somebody who's a victim of crime is likely to have been a victim of other social problems already.

This is all well and good, but it's all theoretical: it doesn't tell us who victims of crime actually are. For that matter, theory doesn't tell us whether we can make any generalisations about victims of crime: perhaps crime is just something that strikes at random, like lightning. (SPOILER: it isn't.) So this week we looked at what we know about crime victims, and how we know about crime victims.

There was a lot in the lecture, too much to summarise here: the history of victim surveys, the demographics of violent crime, the use and misuse of statistics about domestic burglary... Hopefully you will have got something interesting out of it. For this blog post I want to stress two points.

Firstly, our knowledge is incomplete. This is a common problem with social statistics: this is the reason why the news doesn't report the number of unemployed people, but always gives the number of those out of work and claiming benefits. Nobody knows precisely how many people are not working; the DSS does know precisely how many people claim unemployment-related benefits. Similarly with crime: nobody knows precisely how many crimes are committed. We do know precisely how many crimes are recorded by the police, but we also know that lots of crimes aren't - which is why we use figures from the British Crime Survey. But the BCS is a sample-based survey - they ask roughly 50,000 people about their experiences of crime, then multiply out to give an estimate of the number of crimes in the country as a whole. There is no precisely accurate figure for the number of crimes that are committed. What's more, because it's a residential survey completed by adults, we know that the BCS is highly unlikely to record crimes against some groups of people: for example, children, dependent elderly people, students living in halls, people of no fixed abode... Every statement about crime levels should be followed by "as far as we know".

Secondly, crime is highly patterned (as far as we know). To some extent, the feminist and radical versions of victimology are borne out by the figures. Social exclusion: living in a neighbourhood with "high levels of disorder" is associated with a higher risk of crime. Ethnicity: BME people are statistically at a higher risk of crime than Whites, even if we're only talking about "colour-blind" crimes like burglary. Gender: almost half of all victims of domestic violence are repeat victims, suggesting very strongly that domestic violence is - as feminists say - part of a continuing relationship of unequal power.

There are also some interesting and very significant findings about age, which don't quite fit any of the main variants of victimology. If you're under 25, your statistical risk of crime is much higher than average, particularly if you're living alone or with other young people; this is especially true of men, but it's true of women as well. Generally, being young seems to aggravate all the other risk factors. It may also make it that much harder to get redress, or to be taken seriously by the criminal justice system at all. Radical victimology comes in many different forms, but as far as I know there isn't much of a school of anti-ageist victimology; this could be an opportunity for someone.

I hope you liked the film, or at least found it thought-provoking. Next week we'll be looking at the whole process of 'moving on' from victimisation (and from victimhood?). We'll also be doing some serious talking about the essay, so if you've got any questions about your essay, do bring them along to a seminar.

Wednesday 7 November 2012

Week 7: Radical victimology

The trouble with the word 'radical' is that it seems to mean so many different things. George Galloway is a radical leftist. Nick Griffin is a radical right-winger. Abu Hamza is a radical Islamist. Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist... and so on. You can apply it to political policies as well: the Coalition is making radical reforms to the NHS; Tony Blair made radical changes to the Labour Party...

These are all true statements, but what do they mean? "Radical" obviously isn't a political programme: we're not saying that the Coalition's NHS reforms would please Nick Griffin and Abu Hamza. (That may be true, I wouldn't really know.) The clue is in the etymology: "radical" comes from the Latin radix, meaning "root". "Radical" basically means "going down to the root" - it's a way of saying that really big changes need to be made.

So when we talk about "radical victimology" we're talking about a perspective on society which says that things are not all right: we are not living (as the classical victimologists believed) in a basically functional society, with crime as a marginal, manageable problem. Radical victimologists, like feminist victimologists, believe that society is structured by relationships of unequal power; that those relationships are systematically unjust; and that this is the context within which we should think about crime and victimisation.

Let's take those points one at a time.

Society is structured by relationships of unequal power: in everything you do, every day of your life, you are always interacting with people who have power over you. Some of the time the tables are turned and you have power over other people; if you're very lucky, very ambitious or both, you can reach a point where you have power over a lot of other people. Most people spend most of their time interacting with people who have power over them - the boss, the DSS, the police...

Those relationships are systematically unjust: from the day they're born, some people are much, much more likely to grow up to be doctors and lawyers than others; some people are much, much more likely to end up living in poverty and be victims of violence and theft. These differences aren't random: the Bad Fairy doesn't pick every fourth baby in a maternity ward, or all the babies whose surnames begin with an R. Being born into a disadvantaged group is bad luck in terms of future prosperity. And that bad luck doesn't simply get handed out on day one: it's dealt out over and over again as you go through life.

This is the context in which we should think about crime: radical victimologists, like feminist victimologists, argue that this context of systematic injustice makes a huge difference to how we think about crime. Is it a good idea to put security guards on the doors of a shopping centre and tell them to bar suspicious-looking characters? Is it a good idea to double police foot patrols on an estate to address concerns about youths hanging around? If a teenage drug addict has confessed to a burglary, is it a good idea to lock him up? You'll get very different answers to those questions, depending on whether you start from the classical position (society is basically working OK, except for this problem of crime) or a radical position (urban youth are systematically discriminated against in our unjust society).

I said at the outset that "radical" doesn't necessarily mean "left-wing". Radical victimologists generally are left-wing in one way or other, but they don't all see society in terms of class: there are radical victimologists who focus on ethnicity and racism, on white-collar crime, on disability and on sexuality. The key points are the ones I listed above - that power relations are fundamental to the way society is structured; that those power relations are unjust; and that those unjust power relations are the context within which we should think about crime and victimisation.

Two brief points about terminology

1: I mentioned above that the late Andrea Dworkin was a radical feminist. "Radical feminist" means something specific, which I talked about in the lecture on feminist victimology. You can be a radical feminist, and a feminist victimologist, but that wouldn't make you a radical victimologist. Sorry about that, it's just the way the words are used.

2: Sandra Walklate argues that "radical victimology" is something specific, based on the "left realist" school of criminology and the use of crime surveys to measure the prevalence of crime in working-class areas. She advocates what she calls "critical victimology", which would be less class-based. Some victimologists have started using this label, but others haven't. I think it's simpler just to say that radical victimology doesn't have to be class-based and use the label more generally.