Abstract
What is a Festschrift? I’m glad you asked. In An International Perspective on Contemporary Developments in Victimology: A Festschrift in Honor of Marc Groenhuijsen, editors Janice Joseph and Stacie Jergenson have collected 22 chapters by 31 authors from 15 countries in honor of Groenhuijsen’s significant contributions to the field. One of the highlights of the book, certainly for colleagues who know Marc well, but also of interest to emerging scholars and graduate students, is the personal note at the start of many chapters describing how Professor Dr Groenhuijsen played a role in the development of victimology in the respective authors’ countries, or how his writings in the field have sparked lines of academic inquiry. The book opens with a warm preface by Emeritus Professor Jan Van Dijk who provides an overview of Groenhuijsen’s decorated career including his appointment to Full Professor in Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure at Tilburg University by age 30, more than 300 scientific publications, numerous service roles in academia and national or international committees, his role as Founding Director of the International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), and President of the World Society of Victimology (WSV) from 2009 to 2018. Van Dijk highlights Groenhuijsen’s focus on victims’ rights and legal reform, comparative victimology, and multidisciplinary approaches.
Editors Joseph and Jergenson have captured these themes with chapters organized into four sections: new perspectives and approaches in victimology, types of victimization, victims’ rights and participation in the criminal justice system, and practical dimensions of victimology. Reviewing an edited volume with an international and multidisciplinary focus can be challenging because of the diverse topics explored, and it is not possible to comment on each paper. However, there are some themes that emerge when reading through the book. An excellent chapter by Robert Peacock, current WSV President, offers a victimological exploration of the African values of Ubuntu, inviting readers to consider ways that culturally rooted understandings of our shared humanity challenge practices in Western colonial models of justice. Peacock introduces the chapter referencing Groenhuijsen’s (2001) emphasis on the importance of culture and meaning for the study of victimology and criminal justice. Many of the chapters echo this notion of shared humanity, calling attention to groups of people who are not well served by current criminal justice practices, such as Arab girls at risk of victimization in Israel (Shechorty Bitton and Hawa-Kamel), victims of transphobic femicide around the world (Joseph), maritime piracy victimization of seafarers and their families (Simons), and sexual abuse of children from Mayan communities in Mexico (Faride Peña Castillo and Adolfina Ayora Talavera).
The collection is also victim-centered, with chapters exploring self-constructions of identity after victimization (Ben-David), differential consequences based on characteristics of the victim (Jaishankar; Songs and Joseph), and evaluation of progress in legislated rights and services established through the victims’ rights movement. The victim-centered lens is expertly applied by Wemmers in her chapter on restitution which concludes that Canadian legislation prioritizes the offender’s ability to pay and the impact on their rehabilitation over the needs of victims who are not provided with collection assistance if a restitution order is not paid. This raises the concern that innovations in victims’ rights have the potential to be co-opted by the criminal justice system and re-oriented around the needs of offenders, a point made by Hagemann and Emerson, Pedra Jorge Birol, and Ćopić and Nikolić-Ristanović in their respective chapters on restorative justice in Germany and the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Serbia, although each paper offers an alternative vision of victim-centered praxis.
Finally, the book explores future trends in victimology, such as the development of Cyber Victimology (Jaishankar), opportunities to adopt new technologies like victim update apps for smartphones or virtual reality empathy training (James and Eyjolfson), while also widening the frame of the victims’ rights movement to align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals set for 2030 (Waller). A notable chapter by Gema Varona grapples with error margins in the trend toward algorithmic victimology. Varona notes the value of computational processes for finding new connections between variables that could not arise through limited causal analyses rooted in traditional theoretically informed approaches to social research. At the same time, she highlights the limitations of algorithms for understanding the nuanced experiences of victims of crime. Varona argues in favor of working together with computer analysts and mathematicians “with open and humble minds” (p. 37) to integrate algorithmic learning within victimology while maintaining a focus on “the human rights of real people” (p. 37), whose experiences might exist within algorithmic margins.
This collection profiles the writing of leading scholars active in the WSV. Few chapters offer new empirical data; rather, many of the papers profile key ideas advanced by each scholar which are central to their contributions to victimology. In this way, the book offers a truly international and multidisciplinary view of contemporary and future perspectives in the field, largely reflective of the approaches advocated by Groenhuijsen. As this is a review of a Festschrift, it seems most fitting to conclude by congratulating Professor Dr Marc Groenhuijsen on his significant contributions to victimology, and to thank editors Joseph and Jergenson for their leadership in offering this well-deserved honor.