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!