Abstract
Victimology as a discipline has grown in exponential significance into the 21st century by offering critical insights on victims as individuals and as participants in systems of criminal justice. Wemmers’ Victimology: A Canadian Perspective is the book that consolidates the essential perspectives and advances debate for full review and evaluation of the rise and development of the victim in criminal justice. Wemmers’ critical research focus of victim rights as human rights significantly informs the content and organisation of the book, and the rise of the victim is substantially explored across this institutional milieu. The book thus delivers an essential volume that consolidates decades of work and aspirational law and policy reform, the arguments of which are immediately recognisable as the work of one of the world’s leading victimologists. The book identifies the victim as a theoretical construct that now bears on the development of justice processes, rights and powers exercisable by victims for their own self-determination in a system that had long forgotten their foundational role, together with the rise of therapeutic and ameliorative approaches that afford victims and others, including offenders, the capacity to make personal reparation within a system still primarily rationalised around the punishment of offenders.
The strength of the book lies in Wemmers’ ability to bring together that which the discipline of victimology does at its best – connect the broader theoretical and cross-disciplinary contexts of victim participation with the structural legal and institutional reforms that now provide new pathways to justice and, importantly, outcomes for victims. Drawing broadly from psychology and the human sciences to demonstrate that enhanced victim participation carries risks and benefits to individual victims, the book provides the interdisciplinary focus that supports the critical analysis and exploration of arguments that promote discrete analysis of institutional reform. This provides the book’s relevance beyond criminology to law and policy, via the disciplines at large. The Canadian focus is much needed at a time when progressive characters of decades past may be jeopardised by present instruments, including but not limited to the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights, which, despite much promise, has done so little to advance victim interests in a substantive and individually meaningful way. It is here that Wemmers’ cross-disciplinary expertise garners full force, critiquing those human rights frameworks – those that deliver, yet also those that fall short – that contour the terrain of victim rights as human rights.
The chapters of the book take the reader through a structured introduction from the broadly theoretical origins of victims as a discrete site of academic interest to the emergence of the victim as powerful subject of political conjecture and now, as a subject of rights and powers in systems in justice increasingly ready to provide victims means of participation or standing in justice processes. The chapters are logically ordered and supply ideal context and discussion for teaching use, enhanced with supplementary materials and examples provided by appendices. Yet this book also consolidates and develops essential materials for researchers. It will undoubtedly be at home on the shelves of those interested in policy reform and advancement.
While the broader contexts of victimology are well covered, the nexus between the theoretical and disciplinary context to the emerging structural reforms, including the development of human rights instruments and frameworks and those taken to enforce them, could draw from nuanced policy example and discussion, and commentary as to institutional intersectionality. Novel international and comparative approaches to the differences between legal representatives and non-legal victim advocates would enhance the arguments presented (see Chapter 10), showcasing Wemmers’ work and leadership on this important policy development. Enhanced focus on narrative victimology and emerging discourse as to victim-survivors, particularly what we now know of the personal and institutional significance of the power of reclaiming traditional abuse narratives by survivors, and risks to be confronted by such reclamation, could also be enhanced by greater use of Wemmers’ leading work on the International Criminal Court, where narratives play an essential role through case determination and reparation (see Chapters 5, 6 and 12). Such guidance is evermore needed – both on the benefits and limits of representation and on discourses around victim narratives – considering the rise of #MeToo and the power of progressive, victim-focused social movements that fundamentally challenge key assumptions as to victim status, power and entitlement. Indeed, such continued momentum demonstrates the rapid evolution of topics covered by this book, and makes a case for the next edition.
Yet the continued development of this fast-moving field does little to detract from the book’s core strengths. Wemmers’ Victimology: A Canadian Perspective is essential reading for those interested in victims of crime in all their dynamism – theoretically, politically, and within the disciplines. However, Wemmers takes this further by providing a powerful analysis of structural and institutional reform, through the emerging human rights instruments that place victim rights firmly on the policy agenda. Bringing together a volume of this kind is no small feat, internationally significant, but with obvious relevance to those especially interested in Canada’s justice response.