Week 7: Victims, law and politics

Over the next few weeks we're going to be looking at how the criminal justice system lets victims down, and what has been done to stop it happening.

Essentially there are three ways that victims are failed by the system, one of which doesn't really qualify:

• individual shortcomings
• institutional biases
• structural flaws

Individual shortcomings - an individual police officer who happens to be corrupt, a judge who happens to be prejudiced - cause victims of crime a lot of grief. Unfortunately they can't be predicted or controlled, they don't (necessarily) follow any pattern and they probably can't ever be entirely got rid of.

Institutional bias is a way of describing what happens when people systematically do their jobs badly. Certain kinds of victim consistently don't get adequate protection from the police, or adequate attention in the courts; certain kinds of crime consistently aren't taken seriously enough, or aren't even seen as being crimes. For obvious reasons, institutional bias often follows the same pattern as existing biases in society - sexism, racism etc - but there's more to it than that. Few people would say that society is generally prejudiced against children or old people, for instance - but being too old or too young can make it very difficult to be taken seriously as a victim of crime.

Structural flaws, finally, are what is at issue when the system works badly even when it’s working well: in other words, when the system is being asked to do something it can't really do. Where victims of crime are concerned, this is an open question: perhaps the criminal justice can give victims everything they want. Or perhaps not - which is what we're looking at over these next few weeks.

This week we went through a whole series of victim-oriented laws, most of them passed under the New Labour government of 1979-90, which aimed to give victims what they wanted, and to 'rebalance the system' in the favour of victims. There was some genuine progress in addressing institutional biases (particularly with regard to young people and victims of sexual assault) as well as some constructive efforts to address structural flaws (especially in the area of compensation). But overall the balance sheet is disappointing: the Labour government seemed more concerned with using the plight of victims to justify its own crime policies. The Coalition government was a lot less hyperactive on the legislative front, but no better in terms of a consistent focus on victims: once again victims of crime became a political football, this time used in the government's battle against human rights. Another law for victims of crime is promised shortly.

If we can't fix the shortcomings of the criminal justice system by passing a law in favour of victims, will it be any more useful to give victims rights, which can be asserted within the system? More on that next week.