Week 3: Victims in the criminal justice system

A big topic this week, and quite a big post.

We're into Part Three of the unit now. Part One was about introducing the idea of the victim and explaining why it's so problematic; this involved looking at the difference between experiencing victimisation and being recognised as a victim, which led on to some discussion of different schools of thought in victimology and a fair old bit about the "*d**l v*ct*m", about which I suspect you are by now sick of hearing.

In Part Two we built on our discussions of radical and feminist victimology by getting into the politics of victimisation and victimhood. We know that not everyone suffers from crime, and not everyone who suffers from a crime will be recognised as a victim; are these random processes, or can we make any predictions as to who is more likely to be a victim of what kind of crime, and who is more likely or less likely to be recognised as a victim? If we can, do our predictions have anything to do with other things we know about society? Looking at questions of gender, ethnicity, class and corporate power, I've been arguing that the answers to those two questions are Yes and Yes: both exposure to the risk of crime and non-recognition as a victim are strongly associated with broader injustices and imbalances of power.

Part Three is about victims in the criminal justice system. There's more descriptive material in this part of the unit - more about how the system actually works - but the angle of the unit is still critical: we're not just asking "how does the system look after victims?" but "does the system look after victims properly?", and even "can the system look after victims properly?".





Let's pause for a song (music optional):

Whose pigs are these?
Whose pigs are these?
They are John Potts',
I can tell them by their spots,
And I found them in the vicarage garden.
- traditional

How did the criminal justice system get started? Once upon a time, there were no courts and no trials; when people had problems with one another, they sorted them out face to face. The vicar would have a word with John Potts, and they'd come to some arrangement: he'd keep his animals in his own garden, or the vicar would let him graze them by the vicarage on Mondays and Wednesdays, or whatever. There would be no laws being broken and no general principles being decided, and nobody would end up with a criminal record.

Then, at some unspecified time, things changed: disputes between people were no longer sorted out by the people themselves, but had to be decided in accordance with the law. Did John Potts have the right to graze his animals by the vicarage? Were they even his in the first place - could he prove it? All of a sudden, any dispute could end up in the courts, where it would be decided according to laws backed by the authority of the government. In the process the role of the victim changed dramatically, from being at the centre of the conflict to merely being a witness to the crime.

So far, so mythical - although it's quite a plausible myth. Coming forward into historical time, we know for a fact that the police took over the responsibility of mounting criminal prosecutions, in Britain, some time in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that as a result a lot more prosecutions took place. We also know that, before the police got involved, prosecutions were very often dropped or settled amicably - which may not produce consistency between different offences, but does give a much bigger role to the victim. The obvious conclusion is that a lot of the new prosecutions which took place after the police took over involved disputes which would not previously have gone to court.

A series of reforms, culminating in the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service in 1982, continued this process of standardisation, formalisation and centralisation, bringing consistency to criminal trials but reducing the role of the victim. However, by 1982 - the high water mark of this process - the contemporary movement for the recognition of victims' rights was already growing. Since that time, there has been a drive to bring victims back into the process, most successfully in the form of victim impact statements (which we discussed in the seminar).

The problem with a lot of the victim-focused reforms we've seen is that governments see victims bureaucratically: a victim of crime, in this way of thinking, is someone who has accessed services designed for victims of crime (services operated by the police, the courts, the probation services...).  Once the machinery of those services has been set in motion, the thinking goes, the victim should have the right to expect a certain level of service from it, e.g. the right to make a statement about the impact of the crime or the right to receive information about an offender's release from prison.

This approach is basically a good thing - it's better than not having the right to make a statement about the impact of the crime, after all. But it has its own problems. The key point is that this approach involves the criminal justice system looking at victims from the perspective of the system - not from victims' own perspective. This means that it's possible to reform the system so that it does more for victims, but only by improving or adding to what it already does. If victims are sidelined by the system, you can't fix that by bolting on a bit of victim-centrality. If victims are to get what they want, a fresh start may be needed - which is where restorative justice shows a lot of potential.