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!