I'm not a feminist. There, I've said it.
I'm not a feminist for a number of reasons; the main one is that I'm a man. I suppose it's not impossible for a man to define his political identity in terms of women's interests, but I think it would be rather unrewarding.
So you don't have to be a feminist to understand feminist victimology, or to appreciate the importance of feminist victimology. All you need is a bit of an understanding of classical victimology and the 'ideal victim' model, and - most important - a bit of an understanding of what was wrong with them.
Classical victimology started from the assumption that things were basically OK. There was society, consisting mostly of nice, normal people and functioning in a normal and orderly way; within that, there was a problem of crime, just as there might be a localised problem of poverty or overcrowded housing or whatever. Each of these problems was associated with a particular sub-section of society; once governments understood those parts of society better, they could bring in reforms to address the problems.
In the case of crime, the classical victimologists thought they'd identified a sub-section of society consisting of criminals and victims: victim-prone individuals, victim-precipitators, members of a sub-culture of violence and so on. Thinking of victims as a social problem, like bad drainage or failing schools, meant that we no longer had to think of them as victims. Only when one of those nice, normal people became a victim of crime - somebody who couldn't be dismissed as 'victim-prone', part of a 'victim-offender dyad' and so on - only then were we dealing with people who deserved recognition as victims of crime. This is the function of the 'ideal victim' model - it puts some victims on a pedestal, at the cost of ignoring all the rest.
The key, fundamental point about feminist victimology is that it started from the assumption that things are not OK. To put that in more academic language, feminists saw society in terms of an unjust balance of power between the sexes - male power over women, in short. Looked at from that perspective, it becomes obvious that a lot of crimes against women are actually crimes of male power over women. This makes it impossible to lump criminals and victims together, or treat victims as part of the problem of crime. Instead, the problem of crime (against women) becomes part of a much bigger problem, the problem of male dominance.
Classical criminology had a tendency to downgrade and ignore a lot of victims of crime, but it tended in particular to ignore women victims of male violence: the victim of domestic violence who is hopelessly 'victim-prone' or part of a 'dyad'; the rape victim who 'precipitated' the attack on her. Feminists argued that this is not so surprising. After all, classical victimology is committed to the idea that society is basically functional, working reasonably well; if our society is actually one of unjust male dominance, then classical victimologists are inevitably going to end up covering it up. Which is a problem, particularly if you're a victim of crime - or a victim of forms of male dominance that aren't seen as a crime, but perhaps should be. (See the Jimmy Savile story for many examples of this.)
So the key insight of feminist victimologists was that crime isn't a marginal problem within a society that's working OK; it's a serious problem, and a symptom of bigger problems in a fundamentally unjust society. This insight was later built on by radical victimologists, who used the same approach to relate crime to other fundamental problems in society - but that's for the week after next.
Happy reading!
Wednesday 24 October 2012
Thursday 18 October 2012
Week 4: Classical and lifestyle victimology
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.
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.
Thursday 11 October 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday 3 October 2012
Week 2: What is a victim of crime?
This week's lecture looked at the definition of a 'victim of crime'. We started from first principles - a 'crime' is what happens when you break the law; a 'victim' is somebody who suffers from somebody else's actions - but rapidly made the picture a lot more complicated.
Why did we do this? What's wrong with sticking to the simple definition? Three reasons, which all have to do with the way we usually think about victims.
Firstly, the concept of 'victim of crime' is fuzzy. There isn't a straightforward list of all the 'crimes' in the world; even if there were, there would be room for lots of argument about whether a particular crime should be a crime, and whether a particular legal action ought to be made illegal. A couple of years ago the drug mephedrone (meow meow) was made illegal after having been legally available for several months. Should it have been illegal all along? Why, or why not?
Not only that, there isn't a definitive list of ways in which you can be a victim of a crime. In the case of a murder, we think of the victim's partner as a 'victim' of the crime - what about the victim's friends or workmates? What if the crime isn't murder but a violent assault that leaves the victim disabled? What if it's a burglary that the victim finds particularly traumatic? We feel as if there ought to be a line to draw somewhere, but it's not at all clear where or why.
Secondly, the concept of 'victim of crime' is powerful: to say that somebody's a victim of crime is to say that attention should be paid to them, they're someone with a claim on the rest of us. To say that a particular social problem creates victims of crime is a very powerful way of drawing attention to it. Some people argue that the crimes associated with prostitution are victimless crimes, and that prostitution is only illegal because of moral objections to it. Others say that most prostitutes are victims - of trafficking, of pimps, of drug dealers - and that prostitution needs to be cracked down on for their sake. This way of looking at it is much more likely to get media attention than the first one.
The logic applies to crimeless victims as well as victimless crimes. If I take out an insurance policy that I don't need because of an honest mistake, that's just sad. If the policy was deliberately sold to me by somebody who knew I didn't need it, then perhaps I'm a victim of crime - and something will need to be done. There is always pressure to recognise more people as victims of crime.
Thirdly, the reason why the concept of 'victim of crime' is powerful is that it's symbolically loaded. We don't recognise just anybody as being a victim of crime; it's much easier to get acknowledged as a victim of crime if you match certain characteristics (we'll be looking at those characteristics next week). We seem to have certain expectations of victims of crime; I think what these come from is the revulsion we feel towards the experience of being victimised (turned into a victim). To be made a victim is to have your world turned upside down (we'll be looking at that in a couple of weeks' time). The person who does that to you has to be a monster; and if the offender's a monster, the victim must be... what?
We'll answer that question next week when we look at the Ideal Victim.
As for this week's seminar, it was all about the connection between crime and blame - how we're more likely to think in terms of blame (and hence think that there's a victim) if a law has been broken, and more likely to think in terms of bad luck if no law is broken. I think we all learned something from that seminar, and what I learned is that I need to prepare more material next time. Subsequent seminars will run to fifty minutes minimum, probably. You have been warned.
For now... over to you. Any questions?
Why did we do this? What's wrong with sticking to the simple definition? Three reasons, which all have to do with the way we usually think about victims.
Firstly, the concept of 'victim of crime' is fuzzy. There isn't a straightforward list of all the 'crimes' in the world; even if there were, there would be room for lots of argument about whether a particular crime should be a crime, and whether a particular legal action ought to be made illegal. A couple of years ago the drug mephedrone (meow meow) was made illegal after having been legally available for several months. Should it have been illegal all along? Why, or why not?
Not only that, there isn't a definitive list of ways in which you can be a victim of a crime. In the case of a murder, we think of the victim's partner as a 'victim' of the crime - what about the victim's friends or workmates? What if the crime isn't murder but a violent assault that leaves the victim disabled? What if it's a burglary that the victim finds particularly traumatic? We feel as if there ought to be a line to draw somewhere, but it's not at all clear where or why.
Secondly, the concept of 'victim of crime' is powerful: to say that somebody's a victim of crime is to say that attention should be paid to them, they're someone with a claim on the rest of us. To say that a particular social problem creates victims of crime is a very powerful way of drawing attention to it. Some people argue that the crimes associated with prostitution are victimless crimes, and that prostitution is only illegal because of moral objections to it. Others say that most prostitutes are victims - of trafficking, of pimps, of drug dealers - and that prostitution needs to be cracked down on for their sake. This way of looking at it is much more likely to get media attention than the first one.
The logic applies to crimeless victims as well as victimless crimes. If I take out an insurance policy that I don't need because of an honest mistake, that's just sad. If the policy was deliberately sold to me by somebody who knew I didn't need it, then perhaps I'm a victim of crime - and something will need to be done. There is always pressure to recognise more people as victims of crime.
Thirdly, the reason why the concept of 'victim of crime' is powerful is that it's symbolically loaded. We don't recognise just anybody as being a victim of crime; it's much easier to get acknowledged as a victim of crime if you match certain characteristics (we'll be looking at those characteristics next week). We seem to have certain expectations of victims of crime; I think what these come from is the revulsion we feel towards the experience of being victimised (turned into a victim). To be made a victim is to have your world turned upside down (we'll be looking at that in a couple of weeks' time). The person who does that to you has to be a monster; and if the offender's a monster, the victim must be... what?
We'll answer that question next week when we look at the Ideal Victim.
As for this week's seminar, it was all about the connection between crime and blame - how we're more likely to think in terms of blame (and hence think that there's a victim) if a law has been broken, and more likely to think in terms of bad luck if no law is broken. I think we all learned something from that seminar, and what I learned is that I need to prepare more material next time. Subsequent seminars will run to fifty minutes minimum, probably. You have been warned.
For now... over to you. Any questions?
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