Week 5: Victims in the criminal justice system

How does the criminal justice system - police, courts, probation, prisons - let victims down?

We can answer this question in two ways. In principle, firstly, there are three ways that criminal justice system agencies can fail victims:

• individual failings: people doing their jobs badly (one corrupt police officer, one judge falling asleep in court)
• institutional bias: agencies working badly in ways that systematically affect particular groups or victims of particular crimes (Black youth being harassed by the police, rape defendants being acquitted disproportionately often)
• structural failings: people suffering as a result of the system working normally, without any individual failings or institutional bias (traumatised victims being left unsupported, rape victims suffering 'secondary victimisation' in court)

It's rare for individual failings - one person's incompetence or corruption - to have a major effect on victims of crime. Institutional bias is much more common in stories of victims being let down by the system; radical victimology and feminist victimology are both good ways of looking at forms of institutional bias. Structural failings are harder to identify and more debatable, but there are certainly some cases where we can say that a victim of crime has suffered as a result of the system doing what the system does.

So far, so abstract. The second way of answering the question is by asking another one: what role do victims have in the criminal justice system?

The police, firstly, have a huge range of functions, but two of the main ones are detecting crime and preventing crime. To detect crime they are utterly dependent on victims of crime: most 'incidents' are reported to them by victims. Historically the police have taken a very selective approach to recording crime, although over the last decade this has changed: the police are now supposed to record a crime every time a victim reports one, unless they have evidence that no crime has taken place. Controversy still surrounds police recorded crime figures, with recent allegations that up to 25% of reported sexual assaults were left unrecorded. The police can be seen as a 'gatekeeper' to the criminal justice system - and by failing to record particular crimes, they effectively keep the victims of those crimes out of the system.

As for preventing crime, it's impossible to prevent crime completely - and, when a crime is committed, there's always room for debate as to whether it was the police's responsibility to stop it. But, when a potential victim calls the police and has no response, or when a serious offender is free to reoffend undetected under another name or in another place, we can say that the victim has been failed.

As for the courts, it can be argued that they fail victims of crime all the time. The police took over the responsibility of mounting criminal prosecutions, in Britain, some time in the first half of the nineteenth century, and as a result a lot more prosecutions took place. Before that time, prosecutions were very often dropped or settled amicably - which, clearly, gives a much bigger role to the victim. A series of reforms, culminating in the creation of the Crown Prosecution Service in 1982, continued this process, standardising criminal trials but reducing the role of the victim.

So there's a real argument that victims are failed by the courts every time a crime goes to court - although, as I said at the outset, it's not always easy to identify actual examples of this happening. And, if the court system is structurally unfriendly to victims in general, it's also possible that it's more unfriendly to some victims than others: women, in particular, often suffer institutional bias within the court.

How to address these problems - by passing laws to make sure that the system gives victims what they want? By giving victims more rights, guaranteeing a certain level of service? Or by stepping outside the entire criminal justice framework and thinking 'restorative'?