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.

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