Week 2: What is a victim?

This lecture starts with a very straightforward question - and answers it in a complicated way.

First, we looked at the definition of 'victim of crime' - somebody who's suffered as the direct result of an illegal action - and asked what happens when we take it literally. Victims of crime are people we sympathise with, people who we feel deserve something: what happens if we restrict that mental category to people who have been directly affected by a crime? It turns out that what happens is quite unsatisfactory: there are lots of cases where we want to think of somebody as a victim of crime, even if they haven't been directly affected (relatives of murder victims), even if no law has been broken (white-collar crime), even if years have passed between the action and its effects (work-related injury).

In other words, there's a constant pressure to expand the category of "victim of crime" to include people who haven't been directly victimised, or people whose victimisation wasn't actually a crime. There is no correct answer to the question of how far the category should be expanded: if a murder victim's partner is also a victim, what about her close friends? work colleagues? old schoolfriends? But the literal approach - narrowing down the category to actual victims of actual crimes - is clearly unsatisfactory.

Second, we looked at how symbolically loaded the experience of being a victim can be. The sense of violation that burglary victims often feel isn't just an emotional reaction to having the room messed up. Ideas of personal continuity and of an 'ordered world' are very deeply rooted in our psychology. Becoming a victim of crime - having your 'safe space' or your bodily integrity violated - can be deeply disturbing, destroying feelings of security which we thought we could rely on. Ironically, this experience is often all the more upsetting for people who previously felt confident and self-reliant; attitudes of fatalism and keeping your head down aren't ideal as far as getting on in life is concerned, but for recovering from being a victim of crime they're very appropriate.

Perhaps the key point about the symbolic experience of being a victim is that it's one that we've all had, whether or not we've been a victim of crime - and we all know how upsetting it is. I think this has a lot to do with the way we think about victims of crime. We want those who deserve sympathy to get it - just as we'd want it for ourselves: so we expand the category of 'victim of crime' to include asbestosis victims, Bhopal victims, victims' relatives and so on. At the same time, we don't want anyone who doesn't deserve sympathy to get it, so we watch victims suspiciously to see whether they're sufficiently deserving or not.

Maybe it's possible to step out of this difficult psychological terrain altogether, and talk about avoidable suffering and harm without labelling those who suffer as 'victims'. Writers in the 'social harm' school (such as Richard Garside and Paddy Hillyard) argue that many forms of avoidable harm don't have an identifiable 'offender' at all: if we keep thinking in terms of individual victims being hurt by individual offenders, we may be focusing attention on the wrong thing.

On the other hand, the experience of being a victim - and the sympathies which victims arouse - are universal and powerful; perhaps the concept of victim is valuable and needs to be held on to. (At least for the duration of this unit!)