Week 10: Corporate crime

This week and next week are a two-parter to round off the term (I'm afraid the guest lecture which was planned for this term doesn't look like materialising). This week's and next week's lecture look at different areas in which radical victimology is useful. Next week we'll be looking at ethnicity as a factor in crime, including crimes which aren't overtly racist in nature or motivation. This week we looked at corporate crime: crimes and other serious harms committed by businesses.

What these very different types of crime have in common is that they both take place against the backdrop of unequal power relations, which affect both the likelihood of becoming a victim of crime and the likelihood of gaining recognition as a victim.

Corporate crime takes many different forms. When Ken Lay of Enron, or Robert Maxwell of the Mirror group, destroyed their own businesses from within for their own benefit, that was corporate crime. When banks sold people mortgage policies that were never going to pay out adequately, or insurance policies that they were never going to be able to claim on, that was corporate crime. When a Dutch company sold Romanian horsemeat to British supermarkets and food processors under the guise of beef, that was corporate crime. All these very different examples reflect a difference of power. Businesses large and small have much more power over us than we do over them, and in some cases the power they have is exercised in unlawful ways: overcharging us, selling us sub-standard products, ordering us to work excessive hours.

Even when it takes directly life-threatening forms, corporate crime has a tendency to remain invisible - "man crushed by machinery at workplace" may be an item on the local news but it won't make the national press. Not only that, but it won't get into the crime statistics. Nobody knows how much law-breaking goes on in business. One reason for this is that business regulation - the main approach used to control commercial rule-breaking - has a strong orientation towards gaining compliance rather than prosecuting wrong-doers. Where prosecution is used, it is used as a last resort: inspectors will try to get managers to co-operate, then use the threat of prosecution to try and induce compliance. Actually taking a company to court is an implicit admission that other methods have failed, and is almost a punishment in itself.

There are good reasons for using this 'responsive', compliance-oriented approach: being treated with respect encourages managers and employees to commit themselves to the rules being enforced, rather than just treating them as a box-ticking exercise. The more punitive approach of prosecuting everything that can be prosecuted may lead to staff getting stressed and demotivated, and only caring about sticking to the rules because they're afraid they'll lose their jobs.

But even if it does produce better results, with less disruption, than a more punitive approach, there's a question-mark over the responsive approach when it comes to the victims of corporate crime. Should corporate criminals always be prosecuted for the sake of doing justice to the victims? Alternatively, is it better to implement regulation that leads to better practices being adopted, so that there are fewer victims in future?

Week 9: Youth, old 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?

Week 8: Who are the victims?

So far we've looked 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 and theories that start from the position that society is characterised by unjust power relations: classical victimology and contemporary 'lifestyle'/'crime prevention' victimology on one hand, feminist and radical/critical victimologies on the other. 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.

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. (Quick question: if you were in government and didn't have any influence over the actual level of employment, but you wanted to make the unemployment figure look better, what would you do?) 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. (More on age next week, incidentally!)

Week 7: Radical victimology

The word "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. And not only crime: this framework has a decisive influence on our ideas about criminal justice and how best to respond to 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 introduce police 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).

A brief point about terminology

Sandra Walklate argues that "radical victimology" is something specific: politically left-wing, class-based, deriving from the "left realist" school of criminology and keen on using 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 and have less of a quantitative orientation. 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 (or quantitative) and use the label more generally: you can do radical victimology by focusing on ethnicity and racism, on white-collar crime, on disability or 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 criminal justice.

Week 5: Feminist victimology

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 drains 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 position that this is not OK - and it's not OK because things in general are not OK. To put that in slightly 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 to 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 - for reasons which perhaps aren't too mysterious - it tended to ignore women victims of male violence in particular. A victim of domestic violence could be written off as hopelessly 'victim-prone' or part of a 'dyad'; a rape victim could be dismissed as having 'precipitated' the attack on her. Feminists argued that this is no surprise. 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. As we saw in the seminar, a woman can be a victim of male power in many different ways before she ever becomes a victim of crime.

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.

Here are details of some employability events taking place this week. It's also a good opportunity to catch up on some reading - see the Unit Handbook for some suggestions. See you on the other side!

Week 4: Classical and 'lifestyle' victimology

Classical victimology is well dodgy.

Just wanted to get that out of my system. To put it in more respectable terms, victimology as we know it is one of the more critical parts of criminology - and classical victimology is a large part of what it's critical of.

Flash back for a moment to the "Ideal Victim". Imagine that you're in charge of paying insurance or compensation claims. You don't want to pay out any more than you have to, but you don't want to get a bad public image. The obvious solution is to pay out to the victims who are closest to the Ideal Victim model, because those cases will seem the most deserving. If you only pay out to  those cases, you can save a lot of money but the public won't mind. Nils Christie's great insight was that, 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.

Classical victimology is, in many ways, about all the victims whose faces don't fit; it's dedicated to proving that their faces don't fit. A lot of classical victimology is - in academic language - highly controversial and rests on discredited assumptions. If you go back to the 1960s and 70s, you can find very respectable academic victimologists arguing seriously 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 - to all intents and purposes, they're wrong. But they add up to a certain way of looking at victims. 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.

Having said all of that, classical victimology did 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, seems a bit melodramatic these days, but it's undeniable that some people have more violent lifestyles than others. And so on. Even victim precipitation could be a useful way of understanding the sequence of events that leads up to a crime, if you don't use it as a way of blaming the victim.

One other thing: when we talk about either classical victimology or 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.

Week 3: What is a victim of crime?

This lecture starts with a very straightforward question and unpacks it, in two different ways.

First, we looked at the definition of 'victim of crime' and asked what happens when we take it literally. Victims of crime are people we sympathise with, people who we feel deserve something: what happens if we restrict that mental category to people who have been directly affected by an illegal action? It turns out that what happens is quite unsatisfactory: there are lots of cases where we want to think of somebody as a victim of crime, even if they haven't been directly affected (relatives of murder victims), even if no law has been broken (white-collar crime), even if years have passed between the action and its effects (work-related injury).

In other words, there's a constant pressure to expand the category of "victim of crime" to include people who haven't been directly victimised, or people whose victimisation wasn't actually a crime. There is no correct answer to the question of how far the category should be expanded: if a murder victim's partner is also a victim, what about her close friends? work colleagues? old schoolfriends? But the literal approach - narrowing down the category to actual victims of actual crimes - is clearly unsatisfactory. At the same time, of course, our ideas and assumptions about what makes a victim deserve our sympathy tend to push the other way, narrowing down the category till it only includes 'ideal victim' types.

Second, we looked at how symbolically loaded the experience of being a victim can be. The sense of violation that burglary victims often feel isn't just an emotional reaction to having the room messed up. Ideas of personal continuity and of an 'ordered world' are very deeply rooted in our psychology; in the case of burglary, we often relate our sense of identity to a personal space which is secure from the world outside. Becoming a victim of crime can be deeply disturbing, destroying feelings of security which we thought we could rely on. Ironically, this experience is often all the more upsetting for people who previously felt confident and self-reliant; attitudes of fatalism and keeping your head down aren't ideal as far as getting on in life is concerned, but for recovering from being a victim of crime they're very appropriate.

The point about the symbolic experience of being a victim is that it's one that we've all had, whether or not we've been a victim of crime - and we all know how upsetting it is. I think this has a lot to do with the way we think about victims of crime. We want those who deserve sympathy to get it, just as we'd want it for ourselves, so we expand the category of 'victim of crime' to include asbestosis victims, Bhopal victims, victims' relatives and so on. At the same time, though, we don't want anyone who doesn't deserve sympathy to get it, so we watch victims suspiciously to see whether they're sufficiently deserving or not.

Maybe it's possible to step out of this contested psychological terrain altogether, and talk about avoidable suffering and harm without labelling those who suffer as 'victims'. Nils Christie argued that naming somebody as a 'victim' leads directly to naming somebody else as an 'offender', then putting the victim on a pedestal and demonising the offender. Writers in the 'social harm' school (such as Richard Garside) take this argument further, arguing that many forms of avoidable harm don't have an identifiable 'offender' at all: thinking in terms of victims and offenders may be a distraction or worse, focusing attention on individual law-breakers rather than harmful social structures.

On the other hand, this unit is about victims, so maybe we should assume for the time being that there are such things as victims of crime.

Now on Moodle: some notes on the case study. Have fun with it, and feel free to get in touch with me if there's anything you're not sure about.

Week 2: 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.

As you know, Christie argues that we have a lot of preconceptions about what a victim ought to be like. The result is that how much recognition we give to actual victims of crime depends 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. Consequently, 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 totally innocent and virtuous in their conduct (why should they be?), and most offenders aren't predatory strangers. So the more we think in terms of the 'ideal victim', the harder it is to see actual victims of crime, and actual offenders, for what they are.

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. When you're thinking about actual victims of crime, and the ways in which they may have been failed by the criminal justice system, it may well be worth thinking back to the 'Ideal Victim'.

The 'Ideal Victim' is not an ideal. It's a standard that some victims meet, but many don't; in fact, probably most victims don't meet it. And they shouldn't be asked to.

Week 1: Hallo world!

This is the first post on the unit blog for Victims and Restorative Justice; thanks for checking it out.

I'll be using this blog to post feedback on our seminar discussions and any other ideas, thoughts and comments relating to each week's teaching. There's not a lot to say in this first week, except

• do read; the more you read for this unit the more you'll get out of it
• do read "The Ideal Victim" in particular; it's an easy read but there's a lot in there (I would seriously recommend reading it twice, perhaps once straight through and once taking notes)
• do start thinking about real-life examples of victims of crime, for the first essay
  
• do ask if there's anything you don't understand; and
• don't panic!

I think that covers everything for now - see you on Friday.

You can leave comments on this blog, although anything that's intended for me personally is probably better done by email.