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!