Wednesday 27 February 2013

Week 8: Victims, politics and the law

Here's a useful link: legislation.gov.uk. If you go there, you can find the text of all Acts of Parliament passed since 1988 - and many passed in earlier years, going back to 1801. The main way in which the law is made in this country is through Bills which are discussed in Parliament, voted on and become Acts; Acts of Parliament are consequently the main way in which criminal offences are defined. If you're ever curious about what constitutes 'harassment' in the law, for instance, the text of the Public Order Act 1986 will tell you - although for completeness' sake you should also look at the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, not to mention the modifications which were made to it by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. More recently, the present govenrment has also amended the Protection from Harassment Act by bringing in a specific law against stalking; you'll find that in the rather Orwellian-sounding Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.

This is all rather complicated and may not seem relevant, but the history of harassment in the law brings out two points about law-making which are directly relevant to victims of crime. One is that politicians act politically: laws are made in response to political pressures, to deal with what seems like an urgent current problem. It's debatable whether a new law against harassment was needed in 1997 on top of the provisions that existed in the Public Order Act; it's very debatable indeed whether new anti-stalking legislation was needed last year. But in both cases the politicians thought there was a problem that needed fixing, and a new law was duly passed. Secondly, if somebody thinks something ought to be done, it's not that hard to take a Bill that's going through Parliament and add a measure to do 'something', even if it's not directly relevant to what that Bill is about. ('Somebody' could be an individual MP, or it could be an MP's constituents, a lobbying group, the police, a newspaper company...) So as well as instant Acts in response to current problems, there are many cases of laws being made through 'tote-bag' Acts containing a huge variety of different measures.

The last government was particularly active in both these ways. A lot of laws passed over the last decade affect victims, and it's not always obvious which laws they are. More importantly, New Labour legislation affects victims in multiple different ways. Sometimes victims are used as the justification for a more punitive approach to suspects and defendants; sometimes victims are seen as people who need compensation (in the case of compensation orders, this overlaps with the previous approach); sometimes they're seen as participants in restorative justice initiatives; sometimes they're seen as people who need justice and deserve better treatment.

The balance sheet for New Labour's law-making on victims is mostly positive: lots of good and useful legislation was passed. But the record is mixed, and - as you'll see if you check back over the lecture slides - it's also very complicated!

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Week 7: Victim Support

We've devoted quite a lot of attention to things that victims need (but aren't getting) and problems with the criminal justice system. This week, for a change, we looked at one of the positive features of the system and described how it actually does give victims something they need.

Victim Support is a charity, albeit one with a constant source of funding from the Home Office; it's probably best considered as a semi-detached part of the criminal justice system. It has a public face which campaigns for a better deal for victims, but it's not primarily a campaigning organisation: the bulk of what it does is simply to provide support to victims. Initially a purely voluntary organisation, Victim Support now has a substantial layer of permanent staff, but the people at the sharp end are still mainly volunteers: the organisation has something like a 1:4 staff:volunteer ratio. This means that Victim Support can offer a level of personal commitment and dedication which you don't always get from a government department: as a rule, people who work for Victim Support are doing it because they really want to. At the same time, Victim Support has 'core' Home Office funding, i.e. funding which isn't going to be turned off overnight; this supports its administrative superstructure and makes it possible to train and manage all those volunteers.

When Victim Support does campaign on behalf of victims, it does so in a very specific way. Unlike some groups which claim to speak on behalf of victims, Victim Support never claims that 'victims' in general want more of a particular kind of sentence (either harsher or more lenient). Victim Support's view, based on years of working with victims, is that 'victims' as a group don't have any particular view on how criminal cases should be resolved: some victims are very vindictive, some are forgiving, some don't care either way and just want to put the crime behind them. Instead of outcome-oriented reforms, Victim Support focuses on the process. Victims may not have any views in common, but what they do have in common is the experience of being a victim and being involved in the criminal justice system.

Rights for victims within the criminal justice process are Victim Support's key campaigning priority. Over the years, most of Victim Support's core demands have been met to a greater or lesser degree; the only one which has clearly not been met is the universal right to compensation. The key process-based rights of respect, protection and information (giving and receiving) are now very largely respected, along with the negative right of not having responsibility for the outcome of cases.

But is this enough? Should victims have more involvement with criminal cases - or even control over them? Is that what victims want? Is it even possible? More on these questions next week.

Thursday 7 February 2013

Week 5: Compensation for victims

There have been three themes running through this unit. The first, encapsulated in the idea of the Ideal Victim, has to do with how we think about victims. We've seen how entrenched some assumptions about victims are, and - more importantly - how unhelpful those assumptions can be. The second has to do with the criminal justice system, and how difficult it is to fit victims into it: the victim doesn't belong on either side of the confrontation between the Crown and the offender, and often ends up, literally, serving as a witness to her own victimisation. The third has to do with what victims want - that is, real victims; ordinary people who happen to become victims of crime. It seems to me that what victims most consistently want is what anyone would want: respect. Some victims are vengeful, some are forgiving; some are knocked flat by the after-effects of the crime, some shrug it off; some want to take an active part in the prosecution of the crime, some want to put it all behind them. The only thing all victims have in common is that they want to be taken seriously, listened to (if they want to talk), given support (if they need it) - in short, treated with respect.

This week's lecture may have seemed like a bit of a digression - I talked about compensation for three quarters of an hour before concluding that both the main compensation schemes are wildly inadequate. However, it actually involved all those three themes. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme is explicitly designed to exclude anyone who doesn't co-operate with the police and anyone with a 'bad character' - which is to say (among other things) anyone who has served a custodial sentence of any length within the last seven years. (Hard luck if you go to prison for non-payment of debts and get beaten up a year later.) Only the innocent and virtuous need apply, in effect.

The other main form of compensation is the Compensation Order, which can be handed down by courts as part of a criminal sentence. This is a vivid illustration of the inadequacy of the criminal justice system to give victims what they need - and of the need for respect. Not all crimes are reported to the police; not all of those are detected, i.e. have an offender identified; not all of those are prosecuted, and (inevitably) not all prosecutions lead to a guilty verdict. But it's only a guilty verdict that can lead to the imposition of a Compensation Order - and even when the option is available, in practice most sentences don't include compensation (often because the offender would be unable to pay). Putting it all together, the criminal justice system can only provide compensation, in the form of a Compensation Order, for a tiny, tiny minority of victims.

When a Compensation Order is made, how much should it be? This is a difficult one. Somebody who has had a leg broken in three places, suffering permanent impairment as a result, isn't going to want to be fobbed off with a ten pound note. But if a more satisfactory order was made - £10,000, say - would this mean saying that the leg was worth £10,000? It's not a calculation anyone would want to make. I think we have an instinctive sense of when monetary compensation is far too low, without having a clear sense of what the right level would be. The reason is the message that it conveys - the point of a very low amount is that it conveys disrespect. Similarly, research has shown - perhaps surprisingly - that victims don't object to compensation payments being spread out over a long period, if there is no other way that the offender can pay. What victims do object to is not knowing how long the period will be or what the payments will be: in short, they object to being kept in the dark, treated with disrespect.

Having said all of that, the fact remains that both the main compensation schemes are wildly inadequate: victims need respect and support, and they need a universal service for victims. Which is what we'll be talking about after Reading Week.