Abstract
In A Victim Community: Stigma and the Media Legacy of High-Profile Crime, O’Leary aims to expand the victimological imagination to incorporate local communities which, while not directly targeted by high-profile crimes, are nevertheless impacted by them, often for years after. In her opening chapter, O’Leary identifies a number of key high-profile crimes from around the world which reverberated not only personally and socially but also culturally – for example, the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in 2015, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008, the mass sexual assaults in Cologne at New Year 2015/2016, and the car bomb and shootings in Oslo and Utoya in 2011. However, with the possible exception of Utoya, none of these examples resulted in the place name becoming synonymous with the crime. In the two case studies she then explores in detail throughout the rest of the book, Dunblane (in Scotland) and Soham (in England), this process has taken place, such that they have become ‘victim communities’.
The two case studies have much in common – both involved UK towns with relatively small populations (of around 10,000); both of the crimes that took place there involved an adult male perpetrator killing children, and both crimes instigated wide-ranging policy changes at the national level (on gun laws and on child safeguarding measures, respectively). I did wonder what the rationale was for selecting these two particular places for study, given their relative similarity, and I wondered what analytical insights might have been produced if there was a comparison with a rather different place (whether in terms of population size, type of crime, or its long-term impact). I also wondered what particular characteristics enabled some (notably more populous) communities to ‘move on’ from their victim status while others (such as Dunblane and Soham) could not.
In her book, O’Leary draws on ethnographic data produced from spending time at each location – visiting cafes, memorial sites, and other significant places of interest, as well as interviewing community members. She supplements this with a content analysis of local and national newspaper reports of the two crimes and their aftermath (the book includes a useful Appendix detailing her fieldwork practice, content analysis framework, and participant characteristics). In her methodological reflection, O’Leary writes sensitively about the challenges of going ‘in cold’ to talk to community members about such an intensely personal yet overwhelmingly public experience. It would have been useful to include a deeper reflection on whether her ‘outsider’ status made a difference to the research design, fieldwork, analysis, and write-up. By way of comparison, my own research about the impact of the West serial murders on those who lived in and around Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, involved ‘insider’ fieldwork, and this significantly shaped our methodological, ethical, theoretical, and linguistic choices (see Holt and Wilkins, 2015).
While positioning her work within ‘cultural victimology’, O’Leary usefully draws from a range of conceptual tools, including Goffman’s ‘stigma’ and ‘spoiled identities’, Christie’s ‘ideal victim’, and Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’. This theoretical eclecticism effectively allows her to focus on process as she knits together the personal and structural aspects of what it means to become a victim community. O’Leary astutely highlights the longevity of this victim status (or the ‘stickiness’ of the community stigma): for example, one interviewee in Soham explained how a subsequent domestic homicide in the town received significantly more media attention than it otherwise would, because of what the town had become known for. Even when victim communities want to move on, it seems that others will not allow it – particularly certain parts of the mass media, who open a ‘revolving door’ into those communities, facilitating the development of what has become known as ‘dark tourism’.
Interestingly, O’Leary contests the very notion of a single unified community – her data from Dunblane highlight the divisions within that community, such as between parents whose children had died and those whose children were injured, and the conflict of ideas about what to do with the overwhelming financial donations sent to ‘the community’. Perhaps such divisions ultimately highlight what prevents communities from engaging in collective action to challenge public perceptions of their ‘victim community’ and eliminate its stigma.
Overall, this book is a fascinating read and will be of huge interest to both scholars and students with an interest in victimology and, in particular, those interested in the nexus between crime, place, and identity.