Who is the victim of crime? Paying homage to the work of Richard Quinney

The Academic Narrative

It is possible to trace the coexistence of a number strands in victimological thought: positivist, radical and critical, but by far the most influential of these has been the positivist. The early conceptual work of Mendelsohn and Von Hentig (among others) is regarded as the bedrock on which what Miers (1989) labelled ‘positivist’ victimology was founded. Developing their respective concerns with victim culpability and victim proneness into a focus on victim precipitation and lifestyle crucially informed the development and refinement of the criminal victimisation survey. Miers (1989), among others, sees this method as the exemplar of positivist victimology. This way of generating data about the nature and extent of crime has gone from strength to strength in forming the knowledge base for policy, not only for national governments but also in the context of European directives and, as far as the International Criminal Victimisation Survey is concerned, for directives from the United Nations. In this narrative of criminal victimisation, the victim is a victim of rather ‘conventional’ crime (burglary, or street crime), ‘normal’, routine, ordinary crime usually occurring in public. Increasingly, however, as a result of work informed by feminism, there has been greater recognition that violence in the home, usually though not always by a man towards a woman, is also ‘normal’, routine and ordinary. As a consequence the criminal victimisation survey methodology has been refined and developed in order to measure this kind of criminal activity too, not only nationally but also internationally. Such refinements notwithstanding, positivist victimology is limited in its understanding of who the victim of crime can be.

Within positivist victimology, the victim is either given by the criminal law, or given by the self-evident nature of their suffering. In Gouldner’s (1968: 106) terms they are ‘naked and visible’. Across different societies the naked victim of household crime is repeatedly shown to be poor and belonging to a minority group, and of street crime is shown to be the poor, ethnic minority, young male. As I have already suggested, as a result of the persistence of feminist voices, some inroads have been made into recognising a wider range of mundane, criminal activity measured by the criminal victimisation survey. Refined, this method has contributed to the greater visibility of the routine nature of much domestic violence and sexual assault. However, other crimes that occur in the home, crimes that occur within state or private care/custody institutions, crimes committed by the state from police brutality to war crimes, and crimes committed by business corporations, remain hidden from view within positivist victimology. (Though it should be noted that Hagan and Rymond-Richmond’s (2009) use of a version of criminal victimisation survey to map and prove genocide in Dafur stands as an exception that proves the rule.) Also hidden from view are the processes that underpin the production of these victims. As Dignan (2005: 33) states, echoing Quinney,

it fails to appreciate the fact that both the state itself through its agencies, and also the legal and penal processes that it sanctions, may themselves create new victims and also further victimize those who have already been victimized by an offender.

To summarise: this version of victimology and its associated empirical agenda consistently points to a regular patterning of criminal victimisation and its impact. Moreover, in using the term ‘victim’ as a uniform and consequently a unifying concept, it has the potential to include ‘all of us’. In other words, it is an understanding of the victim that we can all relate to. (The cultural significance of ‘all of us’ is considered more fully below.) This ‘all of us’ does not include offenders. Within positivist victimology, victims and offenders exist in a zero sum relationship with one another. The fact that as experiential categories they overlap, or that there may be ‘delinquent victims’ (Miers, 2007), is difficult for positivist victimology to embrace. Consequently positivism reflects a rather individualistic, passive and static understanding of the process of criminal victimisation and betrays an implicit acceptance of a functionalist view of society (Walklate, 1989).

A much less dominant but nonetheless important strand of victimological work emanates more clearly from Quinney’s question: Who is the victim? In centring the powerful as arbiters of social harm, victimologists of a radical persuasion have either embraced a human rights perspective in setting an agenda for their work (in this vein, for example, consider the work of Elias, 1986), or have argued much more directly for a ‘victimology of state crime’ (Kauzlarich, Matthews and Miller, 2001). This victimology brings to the table a much wider appreciation of the concept of victim and by definition makes visible categories of victims hidden from view within positivism. Indeed, Quinney (1972: 322) suggested that ‘Perhaps it is time that we investigate our own minds—our own theories of reality’ and went on to observe, ‘To exclude the Vietnamese civilian suffering from criminal war operations is to accept national military policies’. Hence, victims of state brutality, either within a state or between states, become visible, as do victims of institutional state actors (like the police) or multinational corporations. Indeed this version of victimology permits even those least likely to carry the label ‘victim’ (soldiers) to be identified in this way (McGarry and Walklate, 2011). This is very much in keeping with Quinney’s (1972: 321) challenge ‘to conceive of the victims of police force, the victims of war, the victims of the “correctional system”, the victims of state violence, the victims of oppression of any sort’ as legitimate areas of concern. Thus radical victimology makes visible the power relations that underpin who is seen and responded to as a victim and who is not, and thus affords a much wider and far-reaching conceptualisation of what counts as crime. It is, however, a perspective that still presumes that who counts as a victim of such crime is given by law with, in this instance, ‘law’ referring to international codes, the Court of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention. Thus the preoccupation within recent criminological interests, that take a victim-centred approach to acts such as genocide (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, 2009) remain wedded to the desire to establish intent on the part of the offender (Hagan and Kaiser, 2011) and thus the ability to call them, legally, to account through evidencing their acts of victimisation. Consequently some aspects of radical victimology are marked by an inherent conservatism similar to that found within positive victimology.

Critical victimology is the last perspective to be found within victimology. It is a label used in different ways by Holstein and Miller (1990), Miers (1990), Elias (1986), Fattah (1992) and Mawby and Walklate (1994). Here is not the place to debate these different interpretations but arguably it is the only interpretation, adopted by Walklate (1989, 1990) and developed by Mawby and Walklate (1994), influenced by feminism and the sociological theorising of Giddens (1984) that affords the opportunity to reframe our understandings of the victim. This understanding of victimology puts to the fore the processes that create the victims we ‘see’ as well as the ones we do not ‘see’ (the power relations that can both create victims and protect perpetrators and thus embraces the concerns of radical victimology) while simultaneously recognising that the victim is a human agent who can adopt an active as well as a passive role in response to their experiences of criminal victimisation. Consequently critical victimology asks questions about the term ‘victim’ itself, and the circumstances in which it is applied. It does this by focussing attention on the underlying structural processes that lead to the manifestation of victimisation. This means acknowledging the patterning of criminal victimisation that so much positivist victimology has been concerned to produce, but understanding that patterning within a framework that appreciates the role of the vested interests of the state in producing it. Within this framework who becomes a victim, and who might embrace a victim identity (Rock, 2002), is neither simple nor straightforward, the available empirical data on the patterning of criminal victimisation notwithstanding. As Mythen (2007: 466) has observed, ‘Acquiring the status of victim involves being party to a range of interactions and processes, including identification, labelling and recognition’ as well as the structural. All of which, of course, indicate a role for cultural processes.

The Cultural Narrative

New York, September 2001; Madrid, November 2003; London, July 2005; Mumbai, November 2008. As Jenks (2003) has commented, these are events that transgress both our collective and our individual understanding of what it is that can be taken for granted in our everyday lives, particularly in relation to what is understood as crime and the nature of criminal victimisation. These events have posed, and continue to pose, multilayered questions not only about the nature and purpose of ‘new’ terrorism but also about the economic, political and social conditions that make such actions an attractive option. The media coverage given to these events and others (for example, hurricane Katrina, and the tsunami of Aceh) is intended to move us: to encourage us to place ourselves next to the victim, for after all, are they not just like us? Indeed one might add to this list coverage of global debt and the extreme events associated with climate change. The excavation of our feelings in this way, without doubt, poses all kinds of questions about the contemporary role of the media, but it also poses questions about such events in and of themselves: the genesis of suffering.

Of course, suffering is not only caused by the kinds of events listed above. It is also caused by much more mundane, ordinary and everyday acts of criminal victimisation: burglary, street theft, common assault and sexual assault. These events take their toll on different people in different ways, as much mainstream (positivist) victimology has been concerned to demonstrate. Whether that be in the form of loss of earnings (Dixon, Reed, Rogers and Stone, 2006: 21) stress, shock and sense of invasion (see Kearon and Leach, 2000, in respect of burglary), impact on family and other relationships (see Hodgson, 2005), or post-traumatic stress syndrome experienced by some women who have been raped and others not normally considered victims, such as soldiers (see Fassin and Rechtman, 2009). This amounts to considerable harm done to individuals as a result of criminal victimisation. Moreover, as Maguire and Bennett (1982) observed some time ago in their study of burglary, that experience is likely to take its greatest toll on individuals who are already experiencing or trying to cope with other events of significance in their lives like, for example, bereavement or divorce.

While working work for a victim support scheme in Liverpool in 1983, I interviewed an elderly lady, Doris, who had been a victim of burglary. The only item that was taken was her son’s watch and she was extremely distressed by this. Her son, who had lived with her, had died earlier that year of cancer and her coping mechanism for managing this had been to organise her time in such a way so that she spent less time in the house on her own. The burglary and the theft of his watch challenged her coping skills and had added further pain to that of the loss of her son. As Sennett (1998: 44) has observed in relation to the changing nature of work, ‘To imagine a life of momentary impulse, of short term action, devoid of sustainable routines, a life without habits, is to imagine indeed a mindless existence’. This elderly woman had had her routines and habits taken away from her by bereavement and then as a result of the burglary. The suffering that ensued was private. It was a mere happenstance that she shared it with me, and that her story moved me. However, her story was (and still is) certainly in many ways mundane and routine, but this ordinary life had been made worse by the impact of crime. Moreover, many ordinary lives globally are characterised by famine, poverty and deprivation, some of which is the result of the (criminal) action and inaction of states charged with their protection. Indeed, this ordinariness of suffering (Quinney, 1991) is part and parcel of the human condition if differently experienced.

However, such private suffering, like that of Doris, has become much more public since the time I conducted that interview and since Quinney wrote his 1972 essay. It is this shift from private suffering to public suffering that raises thought-provoking questions. These questions are embedded in Quinney’s (1972) discussion of victim compensation. Here he observes the tensions between personal responsibility, the responsibility of the state, and conceptions of the victim that compensation schemes might presuppose. Indeed, in this latter respect Miers (1978, 2007) has discussed in some detail the powerful motif of the ‘innocent’ victim of crime as being the prerequisite for entitlement to benefits from such schemes. This is a motif that can be traced not only in national compensation schemes but also in European agreements on such matters. It is a motif that counts some events as crime and others not, as the rapid overhaul of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority of England and Wales in the aftermath of 7 July 2005 illustrated (see Home Office, 2005) when it became evident that the victims of that event would not necessarily be entitled to compensation, and certainly not quickly.

Arguably this shift from private to public suffering can be attributed to what Furedi (1997/2002) has called the rise of the ‘compensation culture’ in which he suggests ‘we are all victims now’. However, some of it must also be attributed to the increased concern with criminal victimisation in which victimology and victims’ movements have been implicated. The increased concern with criminal victimisation and the impact of crime is illustrated in the rise and influence of the criminal victimisation survey, nationally and internationally, alongside the growth and coordination of victim support organisations (again nationally and internationally) all underpinned by the power of positivist victimology. Parallel with these developments there has been what Valier (2004) has called the return to the gothic: vicarious attention to the suffering of others. This attention, manifested contemporarily primarily through visual means (TV, film, the Internet and mobile phones), places us side by side with the victim: we are encouraged to feel what they feel. Indeed media, political and professional invocations of the victim are all intended to move us: to court our compassion. Policies that are intended to give the victim a voice in the criminal justice process, such as impact statements and restorative justice conferences, reflect a similar intent. As Karstedt (2002: 304) has observed, these invocations are used in such a way that ‘An imbalance in the collective mood thus easily intrudes into the criminal justice system where decisions disadvantage actual offenders’. Such invocations have also been used for wider political purposes, especially in the post 9/11 contexts exampled by the politicisation of fear (Mythen and Walklate, 2006) and the securitisation of everyday life (de Lint and Virta, 2004). Thus, as McEvoy and Jamieson (2007: 425) suggest, ‘Suffering becomes reshaped, commodified, and packaged for its public and didactic salience’. It is a particular kind of suffering, however: it is an individualised as opposed to a collective suffering (see Walklate, 2012; Woodward 2004). This commodification of suffering, aptly illustrated by the observations of Fassin and Rechtman on the foregrounding of trauma by the media and NGOs in the aftermath of the tsunami in Aceh, neglects other realities:

Both before and after the tsunami survivors in Aceh were already victims of political domination, military repression, and economic marginalisation … Trauma is not only silent on these realities, it actually obscures them. (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009: 281)

In the promotion of individualised suffering sight is lost of the (historically) present social dimensions of suffering. In this respect Quinney (1991) might point to the interconnections between what goes on in our minds (how we choose to respond or not respond to the suffering of others) and the economic and political dimensions to such suffering. Service and compassion might overcome individual suffering but in so doing can cloud our minds to the power of the social dimensions of suffering. Of course sufferings will vary in their manifestation and impact in different cultural contexts. They will not be uniform. However, these cultural narratives of victimisation, connected with academic narratives, point to the significance of appreciating how we understand what counts as harm and who defines such harm: the political narrative.

The Political Narrative

The political narrative surrounding criminal victimisation is multilayered. A political claim to the label of ‘victim’ can be made at a personal level, for policy purposes and for partisan purposes, and such politics can be found within academic victimology, victims’ movements and debates around appropriate policy interventions. At the level of the personal, who is targeted by what kind of support is, in and of itself, imbued with politics. Christie (2008) has commented,

Help might also increase your troubles. Help helps define you as weak and vulnerable. In addition comes that being given the status of being a victim might increase the suffering and slow down the healing process … A good victim policy would be to reduce the importance of being a victim and instead emphasise an identity based on having been able to restore dignity as a decision maker in one’s own life…

Christie’s observations encourage us to think about, not the reduction of available support processes but how the kind of support on offer builds on, interferes with, or undermines people’s own coping skills and, moreover, to what extent the policies that drive that support are informed by concepts that work to facilitate our understandings of people’s coping skills (Walklate, 2011). Yet even at the level of service delivery some voices are heard and others are silenced. Some harms are recognised and others are not. So how might politics manifest themselves at the level of policy?

Since the publication of the ‘Justice for All’ White Paper in 2002, the UK Government has been preoccupied with ‘rebalancing’ the criminal justice system in the interests of the victim. While the political rhetoric on this theme has not abated, the evidence of it actually making a real difference to victims of crime is fairly thin on the ground, and where there has been some change it appears to be quite marginal (Walklate, 2012). One of the problems has been with what has been referred to as the ‘implementation gap’. Put simply, passing a code of practice is one thing, ensuring that the professional implementation of such a code and any legislation that may accompany it is another matter. Simultaneously it is evident that responses to some victims have been conceived and developed in ways that were not present before. By way of illustrating this level of politics, the work by Claudia Aradau (2004) on European policy responses to human trafficking is illuminating. Aradau (2004) uses the phrase ‘the politics of pity’ to identify how governmental strategies legitimate (include) or delegitimate (exclude) the suffering of others (victims) as actionable in terms of policy intervention. Through these politics some suffering is recognised and some goes unnoticed (though it should be noted that those who are recognised as suffering must also be deemed deserving, resonating with Christie’s (1986) concept of the ‘ideal victim’). Aradau (2004) herself is particularly concerned with the ways in which trafficked women become transformed from being a dangerous other (sex workers, not to be pitied) to being the subjects of policy intervention (victims of trafficking, to be pitied). However, for the purposes of the discussion here, it is important to recognise that these politics also excavate our feelings; we are exhorted to be compassionate, pitiful, and sometimes vengeful, for the victim (of crime). So who, how and why individuals or groups become worthy of pity can be the result of political processes in which some voices are heard and others are not. Indeed, policy-makers and the academy make their own contribution to who is heard and who is silenced in how they conceive, explore and respond to people’s experiences, as do victims themselves, sometimes in order to avoid the stigma of victimisation (see Hallsworth and Young, 2008). Such silencing processes frame events in particular ways and exclude other framings (see Mathiesen, 2004). The absences that result can be powerful (like, for example, the absence of those routinely injured or killed in a criminogenic workplace; Whyte, 2007).

Taking these three narratives and their cumulative effect, it is possible to see how we have shifted from a time in which people’s coping skills were put to the fore to a time in which those skills are now very much in the background (Furedi, 1997/2002; Durodie, 2004). Academic victimology, especially as articulated by the powerful influence of positivist victimology, with its uniform and unifying concept of the victim, alongside the rise of victim movements, has been influential in sidelining these coping skills (see also Green, 2007; Walklate, 2011). The politics of pity runs alongside this and is energised by it. The question remains: why does this matter?

The Power of Politics and the Politics of Power

Some time ago C. Wright Mills (1959: 13) observed that the relationship between personal troubles and public issues was a central concern for the sociologist. As a sociologist who has spent over thirty years researching and writing on criminal victimisation, the relationship between personal troubles and public issues is an intriguing one. Just as Doris moved me in 1983, so did the poignant picture, displayed in all the daily papers in 2010, of Helen Fisher, desperate in her desire to place flowers on the cortege carrying the body of her cousin being repatriated from Afghanistan, at Royal Wootton Bassett. Being moved by one event does not exclude being moved by others but stands as testimony to the power of what Quinney would refer to as witnessing. Alongside this, in this paper I have suggested that, if we focus on the parallel narratives around the victim through academic, cultural and political lenses, it would seem that the capability of individuals to resolve their own personal troubles that belong to them has been increasingly eroded. This erosion, commented on some time ago by Christie (1977), now has considerable cultural resonance. Furedi (1997/2002) and others have observed that in the contemporary cultural climate, victimhood and citizenship have become elided (see also Young, 1996). Some of this elision can also be related to the persistent power of the academic victimological embrace of positivism. This embrace, typified by much mainstream victimological work, as I have argued elsewhere (Walklate, 1994) puts serious constraints on victimology’s ability to ‘see’ the harms of the powerful (Quinney, 1972) as well as to appreciate the shifting sands of the politics of pity. It perpetuates ‘a male, white, heterosexual, Eurocentric view of what constitutes knowledge’ (Walklate, 1994: 13). The tendency for ‘hegemonic epistemologies’ to become embedded in the social sciences and the wider policy and political world has also been commented on by De Sousa Santos (2009). Such ‘hegemonic epistemologies’ determine what counts as valid knowledge and what does not and is suggestive of an Occidentalism that Cain (2000) has commented on in relation to criminology, and that I have developed in the context of the use and deployment of the criminal victimisation survey (Walklate, 2008). Taken together these domain assumptions mean that ‘we’ fail to grapple with the possibilities inherent in other ways of appreciating the lived social world. Yet there are other versions of victimology that may do some of this work for us. This returns us to the concerns of a critical victimology and its relevance for the issues discussed here.

Some time ago, Harre (1979) made a strong case that the deepest human motive was to seek the respect of others. He posits that the maintenance of respect (and by implication the avoidance of contempt) is not just an attitude, it is a social relationship. A social relationship that is predicated on human beings having a sense of agency: as being capable of self-knowledge, self-monitoring and self-intervention. As he says, ‘The task of the reconstruction of society can be begun by anyone at any time in any face to face encounter’ (Harre, 1979: 405), a position rather reminiscent of that found in some of Quinney’s (1991) observations on criminology and peace-making. In the context of criminal victimisation, it should not be forgotten that victims are people trying to deal with more or less exceptional circumstances in their lives: from Doris to Helen. For some of those circumstances they may feel responsible; for some they may feel that they share the responsibility with other people; some things they will recognise as having just happened to them (Harre and Secord, 1978). How they deal with these circumstances will depend in part on their own personal resources, the resources of those close to them, and the kind of support that they may or may not be offered by the various agencies they come into contact with. Crucially of course, sometimes we are not responsible for what has happened to us and neither do we have the resources to cope with such events. Critical victimology is concerned to provide a framework to understand these kinds of processes.

Centring respect, then, has manifold implications for (positivist) victimology, policy and service delivery, since respect is not produced in a vacuum but under specific socioeconomic conditions. Moreover it is the interplay between who acquires the victim label, how, and under what socioeconomic conditions, the focus of critical victimology, that renders it much more sympathetic to thinking about, as Quinney (1972: 315) would suggest, ‘investigat[ing] our own minds—our own theories of reality’. It is in this observation that we can recognise the politics of power as well as the power of politics. Quinney was, of course, writing at a time when, as he said, ‘To exclude the Vietnamese civilian suffering from criminal war operations it to accept national military policies’ (ibid.). Thus Quinney exhorted us to reflect, imagine, to think otherwise, and to remember that ‘Social harm, no matter how abstract, is a reality decided upon by those in power’. Once so exhorted, there is no room for retreat, making an exception, or abdication (McEvoy and Jamieson, 2007). Once exposed to Doris or moved by Helen, there is no room for manoeuvre.

Conclusion: The Ongoing Legacy of the Work of Quinney

For much of his life Richard Quinney was, and still is, a keen photographer, having published eight books of natural history and/or photographs since his retirement from teaching in 1997. In some ways these can be seen as one way he has continued the practice of bearing witness that he espoused as the role for the criminologist in an essay first published in 1998. For him,

There is much for the criminologist to witness … My own current witnessing is to the kinds of suffering and violence that are a systematic and structured part of contemporary existence. In fact the largest portion of violence is structured and is generated by, or committed by, governments, corporations, the military and agents of law. (Quinney, 2000: 208)

In this witnessing there are many sources for criminologists (but here we can equally assume for the victimologist): testimonies, photographs, investigative journalism, autobiographies etc. It is important to note that such witnessing is not, and could never be, a neutral process; ‘The witness first has to be where the suffering is taking place. And once there, the witness is moved by conscience to observe and make the report’ (ibid.: 207). Thus Quinney is concerned to photograph the mundanity of human suffering. Collections such as Things Once Seen (2008) challenges those who would elevate the transgressive but fail to see the normal. Sullivan (2010) encourages us to think of this collection as being both a window and a mirror: a window on contemporary social life and a mirror that encourages us to reflect on our role as witnesses to the contemporary social condition. In this way the contemporary turn to visual culture affords a window of opportunity for victimology and victimologists to think critically about their role in framing this culture. (For an initial exploration of this opportunity see Walklate et al., 2011.) Here is the space for witnessing that emanates from the work of Quinney. It demands our engagement with what we see and challenges us to think about what we do not see. Herein lies the potential for a cultural victimology.