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By 1980, the violence rate had reached its highest level in memory, including a modern record of more than 23,000 homicides. The victor in the presidential race that year, Ronald Reagan, was surrounded by key supporters and advisers who wanted to make crime a high administration priority. The administration named a violent crime task force that called in August 1981 for a stronger federal role and changes in the law to favor the prosecution side. Three years later, a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats used a parliamentary maneuver to enact the most far‐ranging federal anticrime law in 16 years. Key players in pushing the anticrime agenda included Republicans like Edwin Meese, a longtime Reagan aide who later became Attorney General; Representative Dan Lungren of California, and prosecutor/crime victims advocate Lois Herrington; on the Democratic side were Senators Joseph Biden of Delaware and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Representative William Hughes of New Jersey. An important provision of the law was a requirement that “sentencing guidelines” restrict federal judges’ power to set penalties in criminal cases. Others created a federal fund to support programs that aided crime victims and set up a “forfeiture” procedure by which law enforcers could seize the assets of suspects and convicts.

This chapter returns to the question of activists' engagement with the state, examining the different forms that movement organizations' relationships with state authorities took during the 1990s and 2000s, when the therapeutic state around child sexual abuse was well‐developed, and shows the kinds of access and compromise these relationships brought. It discusses entry of activists into state agencies, movement organizations' professionalization, and increasing funding to provide services to the state, arguing that some groups became part of a para‐state. It traces organizations' use of crime victims compensation funds and activists' attempts to increase criminal and civil penalties for child sexual abuse Finally, the chapter analyzes newer organizations' involvement with public health initiatives to prevent child sexual abuse. Overall, the chapter argues that activists' involvement with the state was shaped by the priorities and pressures of the state, showing the continued power of medical and criminal approaches over others. Yet activists, particularly in the public health wing, continued to bring larger political goals into their work, illustrating the paradoxical nature of social movement outcomes.

This chapter explores in more detail the nature and quality of interaction citizen groups have with the policy process in the two urban locales studied. In particular, the chapter addresses the two major questions left unanswered by the empirical analyses of the previous chapters: First, are the broad citizen groups that are active at the local level participating meaningfully in the policy process? Second, are they contributing anything substantially different from other groups? This chapter offers a more in-depth analysis of the local data in an effort to answer these complicated and underexplored questions and argues that the groups mobilized locally around urban crime problems frequently present policy frames that are substantially different from those promulgated by criminal justice agencies, professional associations, and highly active single-issue groups. Indeed, the deep connection urban dwellers have to crime, its causes, and its consequences makes their perspective unique and highly practical. Most notably, the policy environment for responding to crime at the local level is considerably more focused on victims—specifically on harm reduction—than is the environment at the state and national levels, where criminal justice agencies and narrow victims' groups dominate and focus much attention on punishing offenders.

Mainstream media sources are one of our most influential storytellers. Public sentiment regarding women, crime, and victimization is directly influenced by the media's linguistics, visual images, and case selection and by the gendered nature of the profession. These factors express causality, establish or reestablish social norms, present ways of interpreting certain events, and affect how these variables exert an impact on women's daily lives. This chapter describes the media's fascination with and representation of some crimes of violence committed against women and children. It also addresses victim myths, as disseminated by mainstream media, and how language plays a powerful role in inflaming passions about victimization events. Moreover, it examines the media's overreliance on crime stories in their broadcasts, and ways in which the industry's organizational priorities impact crime reporting. It concludes with examples of how accurate and responsible media reporting can legitimize the existence of social problems, increase public awareness and education, and empower crime victims.

This chapter examines several complex victim-related issues that were not extensively addressed elsewhere in the book, such as the politics of victimization and topics germane to the social and legal labeling of crime victims and victimizations. It raises unresolved questions about female victims and the politics of the victimization discourse, debating whether the responses are largely symbolic or whether they offer real reform. It also analyzes the policy outcomes associated with Violence Against Women Act monies and reviews several promising state-level prevention programs aimed at reducing the victimization of women and children. In addition, it offers some overall recommendations regarding the future directions of the victims' rights movement aimed at ending violence against women. The chapter concludes by considering alternatives to victims' use of the formal criminal justice system, looking at the potential of restorative justice and other dispute resolution alternatives.

Victims were the forgotten piece of the criminal act, largely ignored by the police and prosecutors unless they were viewed as valuable tools in the apprehension or prosecution of offenders. This trivialization led victims to become more reluctant to seek help from the criminal justice system or participate in criminal proceedings. The 1960s and especially the 1970s saw a growing recognition that victims were erased or denigrated by representatives of the criminal justice system, which ignited a national victims' rights movement to create more balance between crime victims' needs and offenders' rights. This chapter traces the different images of victims and discusses how these images relate to our understandings of victimization and victim blaming. It explores the competing ideological positions about the status and reality of victims and victims' issues and the ensuing victim backlash that occurred after the “successes” of the contemporary victims' rights movement. It also discusses the commodification of victimhood, victim culture, victim culturists/social commentators versus “radical” feminists, and victim empowerment.

A major federal anticrime agency had its roots in an Office of Law Enforcement Assistance established in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The agency was enacted into law in a wide‐ranging crime law enacted in 1968. Its name was changed to the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA); its purpose was to distribute federal aid to state and local criminal justice programs. But Congress ordered the agency to be headed by an unwieldy troika of administrators. A succession of leaders over a decade frequently changed policy directions, setting an erratic course while spending almost $1 billion annually in some years. The agency funded some pioneering programs, such as units in prosecutors’ offices to help crime victims and witnesses. Eventually, however, its programs lacked sufficient proof of significant impact on the crime problem or the justice system. President Jimmy Carter proposed its elimination in 1980 and Congress agreed.

This chapter demonstrates that the CCPOA’s success flowed in part from the union’s ability to develop mutually beneficial alliances with other organizations. It contends that the union’s most important allies are uniquely political and punitive crime victims’ groups, which the union effectively created. Since their inception in the early 1990s, the victims’ organizations have helped the CCPOA achieve power by proxy. As these groups became the voice of crime victims in California, they fundamentally altered the architecture of the state’s penal field.

In recent years much academic literature exists to educate people about crime victims' experiences and the obstacles that limit their choices and abilities to prevent or handle their victimization. Blatant victim blaming has fallen out of vogue. Laws have been enacted to reflect a movement away from victim precipitation or provocation theories. Protocols used by police and prosecutors to respond to crime victims have been revamped, reflecting a change from traditional beliefs about shared victim responsibility to a new awareness of the support a victim needs when navigating the criminal justice system. Yet despite these best efforts, victim blaming and myths about victims persist. This book presents the major debates, controversies, quagmires, unintended consequences, and unanswered questions about victims, victims' rights, and victim-centered policies. Instead of taking a more gender-neutral approach, it focuses on crimes of personal violence committed by (mostly) men against (mostly) women and girls, such as sexual assault and rape, battering, and, to a lesser extent, stalking.

This chapter investigates the consequences of policies for victims of crime using examples drawn from the larger political arena. As the state becomes more involved in regulating citizens' lives, there is a potential for new policies to cause unintended harm to crime victims. The chapter explores dilemmas faced by battered women as a result of new crime prevention policies and legal protections related to public housing, welfare reform, and civil forfeiture cases. Further, using data gathered from women arrested on domestic violence charges, the chapter questions the appropriateness of relying on an incident-driven criminal justice system to determine appropriate responses to the use of force, especially when women's use of force in intimate relationships may be more self-defensive than aggressive.

This chapter examines changes in the representation of the victim as a vaguely empowered consumer of criminal justices services in Great Britain during the period from 1997 to 2001. During this period, the formal position of crime victims and witnesses in the criminal justice system underwent a significant transformation. Victims were no longer considered the forgotten party of the system. However, professions of support for the greater emancipation of the victim were not necessarily matched by practical work in the criminal justice system.

This chapter explains the objective of this book, which is to reconstruct what the politicians and policy-makers of the British Labour government during the period from 1997 to 2001 sought to achieve when they talked about placing the ‘victim’ at the heart of criminal justice. This book discusses the forms of criminal justice as they evolved during this period and examines the substance of policy as those forms shaped political representations and activities centred on victims of crime. It analyses the role of the Home Office in protecting victims' rights and explores the passage of relevant legislation including the Victims' Bill of Rights, the Victims and Witness Bill, and the Domestic Violence, Crime, and Victims Bill.

This chapter examines a number of intervention strategies intended to identify, intervene in, and treat violence in the home including state level interventions such as mandatory reporting mechanisms, protective agency service laws, criminal sanctions, protective orders, and specialized courts. Services for crime victims are reviewed including crime victim compensation programs, safe housing, crisis intervention, therapy, and advocacy as well as specific treatment programs for offenders.

This chapter looks at the effects on victims of crime of the reform of legal reparation or restorative justice in Great Britain during the period from 1997 to 2001. It highlights involvement of the victims in various activities related to reparative justice including victim–offender mediation, family group conferences, restorative cautioning, and regulatory cautioning. It describes the evolution in the motives and meanings of restorative justice.

This chapter explores what people who view themselves as victims of war crimes and crimes of humanity and who will never see firsthand the inside of the ICTY courtroom think about the justice delivered by the ICTY. It focuses on their views about distributive and procedural justice, and studies the correlates of their perceptions of ICTY fairness. It examines basic propositions of the procedural justice theory in a new and novel setting (a transnational court), with new types of respondents (victims directly affected by the war, but not able to participate in the proceedings) and very serious crimes (i.e., war crimes, crimes against humanity).

This chapter examines the impact of the death of black British student Stephen Lawrence on the British governments' policies for victims of crimes during the period from 1997 to 2001. It suggests that Lawrence's death had a delayed but galvanic effect on the criminal justice system. It influenced the recruitment, deployment, and working methods of the police. It also affected the work of the courts, prisons, and prosecutors, as well as the employment and promotion of staff in the Home Office.

This chapter examines criminal injuries compensation in Great Britain during the period from 1997 to 2001. It discusses policy development centred on the victims of crime and explains the policies and practices of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA). It suggests that developments during this period clearly show how the boundaries of classes of morally-deserving victims were defined by the economic imperatives of a demand-led compensation scheme operating within financial constraints.

This chapter explores the following questions: Do crime victims influence the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in ways that produce unfair results for defendants? Does the exercise of prosecutorial discretion lead to unjustifiable disparities in how victims are treated in the criminal justice process? It also evaluates other questions about the connection between prosecutors and crime victims. In general, the prosecutors should certainly support crime victims, consult with them, and consider their views when making prosecutorial decisions. However, prosecutors should never assume the role of the victim's attorney. They represent the state, not the individual victim. Their goals are much broader than those of the victim and may sometimes even conflict with the victim's wishes.

This chapter argues that the extent and severity of atrocities and the ICTY's limited time and resources appear to require the involvement of the local criminal justice system to address the widespread and systematic scale of violence that occurred during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Experts have criticized the local judicial systems for their lack of independence, incompetence, and corruption. Yet, respondents show increasing confidence in their local courts. It seems that there is a predictable sequence to international efforts to restore a sense of domestic criminal justice, and that, ultimately, settings and persons who have experienced major crimes against their people will wish to reclaim an indigenous role in the restoration of locally experienced justice.

This chapter suggests an analysis of the mechanisms underlying the processes associated with the rise of victimhood and its impact. It offers a critical understanding of the current imagining of the crime victim in the discourse of community safety. It considers what is meant by community in the context of community safety. It further considers what is meant by safety in this same context. It offers a perspective on the nature of the crime victim presumed by the community safety discourse by considering the concept of protection in understanding who the victim of community safety might be. It gives a few words on images of the community in relation to crime and safety.