Abstract
In Victim Support and the Welfare State Carina Gallo and Kerstin Svensson examine how the Swedish national victim support organization – BOJ – was born, how it developed and what impact it has had on Swedish crime policies through the years. The study is linked to several research fields, most importantly to victimology and civil society research. The book is a welcome contribution, especially to the study of victim movements, because this research field has been dominated by the analysis of victim movements in Anglophone countries (pp. 1–2), which may lead to an unbalanced understanding of victim organizations. Indeed, one of the most important remarks in Gallo and Svensson’s book is that the BOJ has not pursued the juxtaposition of victims and offenders, which is something that has been linked to the victim movement in the United States, for example.
Victim Support and the Welfare State is based on the analysis of extensive research material, which consists of the BOJ’s archives and interviews with key figures within the BOJ. The research materials are examined vis-à-vis the changing Swedish welfare state over the past 30 years. In addition, the authors contrast the development of the BOJ with victim movements elsewhere, especially in the United States and UK.
The story of the BOJ starts in Chapter 2, which presents a description of the position of crime victims in the Swedish society before the first attempts to set up local victim support services in the early 1980s. The most interesting observation highlighted in this chapter is that the expression ‘crime victim’ was hardly ever used before the 1980s. Consequently, for the BOJ to emerge and secure its position among social and criminal justice services, certain structural and political changes had to take place in Sweden. First, it required that ‘crime’ would become conceived of as more an individual than a social problem. According to the authors, this change appeared when a law-and-order discourse emerged in Swedish politics for the first time in the mid-1970s (p. 26).
The second structural change needed for the BOJ to become successful was that from a welfare state to a welfare society (Chapters 4 and 5). This was enhanced by the centre-right government that welcomed the idea of non-governmental organizations and private enterprises as providers of social services in the early 1990s. For example, after persistent lobbying from the BOJ, the centre-right government introduced the Crime Victim Fund, which was financed through payments from offenders and not through tax money. This fitted well with the neoliberal set of ideas that were taking hold in Sweden at that time (p. 92). Since its introduction in the mid-1990s, the Crime Victim Fund has been the main source of BOJ’s funding (pp. 90–91).
Nevertheless, as clearly indicated in the book, besides the structural changes that supported the emergence of volunteer-based victim support, the efforts of the so-called entrepreneurs were essential for the birth and growth of the BOJ. These entrepreneurs were, first and foremost, former prison psychologist Björn Lagerbäck and ex-police officer Per Svensson, who were founders of the first local victim support centres. Lagerbäck and Svensson, with their colleagues, were tireless lobbyists, who through the years continuously reached out to politicians and other decision makers to inform them about common victims’ needs (pp. 62–63). Also, Svensson’s background facilitated the forging of relationships with local police districts, which were essential for the success of local victim support centres (p. 66). That is, the first victim support centres initially suffered from a lack of contact with victims (pp. 46, 55); however, as the police agreed to send information about crime victims to the centres, they began to flourish.
Much of the book is devoted to the above-described, so-called construction era of the BOJ, which extended from the late 1980s until the beginning of the 2000s (p. 147). The second era of the BOJ is called consolidation, which lasted from the early 2000s until the beginning of the 2010s (p. 148). This was a time when the BOJ, and other victim support services, succeeded in acquiring a stable position in Swedish society. A notable example of such stabilization was the Support to Crime Victims Bill in 2001, following which victim support became the responsibility of municipal services (p. 113). This helped the BOJ to secure its funding (p. 153). The bill also made it possible for the BOJ to provide services to abused women, who became conceptualized as ‘crime victims’ in the bill. In fact, from the beginning, the BOJ strived towards expanding its services to victims of gender-based violence and sought collaboration with women’s shelters (pp. 75–76). However, this collaboration became possible only after the Swedish women’s shelter movement split, and the ‘less-feminist’ half of the old organization entered into cooperation with the BOJ (p. 103). According to Gallo and Svensson, by doing this, the BOJ indirectly advanced an individualistic notion of the problem of violence against women, because its approach was based on serving individual victims’ needs rather than the structural issues behind the problem (p. 157). In general, the consolidation phase of the BOJ included increasing specialization to working with specific groups of victims (Chapters 6 and 7).
The authors label the last era of the BOJ restructuring, which started in 2012 (p. 148). It included the professionalization, standardization and streamlining of the BOJ’s work. These developments were facilitated by two simultaneous trends. First, professionalization was advanced by new public management, which meant that Swedish authorities were now focused on managing the work done by non-public bodies on their behalf, from whom they also expected more professionalism and efficiency (p. 125). Secondly, efforts to standardize victim support services, especially through the European Union’s Victim’s Directive, influenced the work of the BOJ (p. 130). Since not all local victim support organizations could meet the new EU requirements and new service principles from the BOJ itself, local centres began to close and merge. The restructuring era was characterized by tensions between the demands to professionalize BOJ’s services and the desire to maintain the organization’s old ideology of ‘fellow-human support’ (p. 134). In effect, it is clear that during this period the priorities of the BOJ became increasingly governed by the state (p. 141).
Overall, Victim Support and the Welfare State offers an intriguing account of what is required for a new organization to be born and mature, something that would surely interest most civil society researchers. For those interested in crime policies, the book serves as an important reminder that victim movements do not always push for more punitive criminal policy; the BOJ never demanded rights for victims at the expense of offenders’ rights, and it even opposed the augmentation of victims’ rights in the criminal process (pp. 111–113). Nevertheless, it is also important to note that indirectly it pushed the political discourse in a more punitive direction by advancing the idea of a more individualistic notion of crime prevention (p. 155).