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This chapter reiterates the importance of Christie’s work, and this volume’s reinterrogation of the ‘Ideal Victim’, both historically and in our modern age. The chapter then explores the relationship between Christie’s work and the development of restorative and transitional justice movements. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the volume and suggests further work to be undertaken both in keeping with Christie’s work and in the field of victimology more generally.

This chapter explores the connection between the punitive turn, with its expressly authoritarian politics, and the liberal political tradition, with its emphasis on individual rights. It also explores how the punitive state is related to capitalism, especially the privatized, deregulated variant known as neoliberalism. The “victimology trap,” the need to see victims of injustice as pure, innocent, and good, disapproves of the accuser's subsequent harsh treatment. In the nineteenth century, liberal conceptions of freedom implied “property and personhood” for some and poverty and deracination for others. Twentieth-century variations of liberalism, with their emphasis on victimized identities, foster new forms of power and control. If liberalism begins with the idea that there might be too much law, it might be better to say that victimist statutes represent a disintegration or involution of liberal norms. Neoliberal penal policy aims at a balance between the curves of the supply of crime and negative demand, before notions of risk, cost, and benefit came to be distorted by panic. The point is to show how the implications of liberalism and capitalism are worked out in unpredictable ways under changing conditions. The history presented here suggests a reworking of the usual causal claims about the relationship between neoliberalism and the punitive state. The punitive turn prepared the way for the neoliberal turn, not vice versa.

This chapter reviews of some of the conventional academic arguments about the principal features of the demography and incidence of criminal homicide. Topics discussed include the penalty for homicide, the criminology of homicide, and the victimology of homicide.

This chapter explores the content and impact of Nils Christie’s seminal essay Revisiting the ‘Ideal Victim’: Developments in Critical Victimology. The chapter outlines Christie’s understanding of the ‘Ideal Victim’ and situates his work within a broader exploration of the emergence of victimology as a discrete field within criminology. The introduction goes on to outline the collection, providing summaries of the later chapters.

Following up on the illuminating article ‘The Ideal Victim’ by Nils Christie, this chapter expands on and reacts to its key arguments. Christie assumes that the most important reasons for perceiving a victim as legitimate and blameless lie in the specific attributions of the victim, and those of the relationship between victim and offender. The article aims at expanding these two arguments on the basis of more contemporary theories in victimology such as the Stereotype Content Model and the Moral Typecasting Theory. However, the importance of two observer related aspects that Christie leaves underdeveloped will also be emphasized. Firstly, the individual’s sense of threat and subsequent coping when confronted with a victim will be discussed. Secondly, the society’s particular interests and values at the time of victimization will be considered. The concept of framing is of particular importance in both aspects, because it can be used to explain how victims may (ex-post) be accepted as ideal or non-ideal, irrelevant of their ‘objective’ attributes, but dependent on the framer, either on collective or individual level.

There is now an extensive body of literature examining sexual violence against women and girls. However, there remains an important gap in relation to ‘older’ women, who have been almost entirely absent from research, policy and practice developments. Traditionally, older age has been reviewed as a protective factor for violent crime, including sexual violence, and both criminologists and feminists have largely neglected those aged over 60 in their scholarship. This chapter examines this absence and argues that ‘real rape’ myths and stereotypes have contributed to the invisibility of older victims. Findings from the first national study to examine sexual violence against people aged 60 and over are presented and discussed in light of the existing literature.

Lynndie England’s conviction, and highly publicised dishonourable discharge from the United States military, for crimes that included photographically documented acts of sexual violence against male detainees in her care, finally succeeded in bringing female sexual offending against male victims to the fore, and served as a watershed moment that forever changed the discourse. Except it didn’t. This event did not disrupt orthodox discourse. It did not breach the gendered binary that casts men as offenders and women as victims. A decade later, it can instead be argued to have bolstered it – being pivotal in maintaining ‘discursive equilibrium’ in preservation of those gendered, normative, binaristic, subject positions that serve to cast men outside of legitimate victimhood; particularly men assaulted by women. This Foucauldian analysis of knowledge production in the academy will examine this stasis, and articulate the discursive mechanisms underlying it - arguing that the ideal victim binary, in the area of sexual violence, constitutes a gender-normative taxonomy that functions as a governmentalised ‘regime of truth’. Ironically, this influence is most stymieing amongst those best placed to resist it.This chapter complexifies Christie’s (1986) concept of the ideal victim through the lens of Foucauldian theory, presenting a clarion call to victimology.

Victimology is about human suffering, often focusing on the consequences generated by crime and how these affect victims and their lives. It analyzes how society manages pain, so concern about victims’ status and needs are important issues. Yet victimology has an undeserved bad reputation, often being accused of exercising commiseration towards certain victims while forgetting others, or providing excuses for the punitive turn in criminal policy. This chapter argues that another type of victimology is possible. Challenging inadequate understandings of compassion and its limits provides us with a useful tool rooted in public virtue which generates stronger and more accurate victim support. An analysis of victim hierarchies illustrates perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victims; those worthy of support and compassion and those that inspire only oblivion or contempt. Further reflection on the ideal victim stereotype present in Nils Christie’s work offers a starting point from which to achieve an inclusive and critical victimology; a victimology that really embraces the conception of useful compassion which is strongly connected with justice as a public virtue in a democratic and decent society. The chapter argues that this may be a way to recover some of the lost prestige of the discipline.

In chapter seven, Criminology’s “fourth war”? Gendering war and its violence(s), a reanalysis of genocide is provided (as previously discussed in chapter four) via an analytic “prism” including: the sub discipline victimology, feminism (as broadly defined) and the study of gender (qua masculinity). The main intention of this chapter is to make clear that the study of war (and crime) within criminology (and sociology) has frequently overlooked its inherent gendered masculine nature. In so doing, this chapter provides a corrective to much of the literature presented throughout previous chapters of this book and gives affordance to critical ways of reflecting upon other conceptual frameworks and concepts used, and assumptions made, in our discussion to this point.

This chapter debates what forms of expertise can be helpful to cold case reviews. The Specialist Operations Centre, part of the National Crime Agency, can provide specialized help and access to a variety of experts who can support detectives in hard-to-solve major crime investigations, and this chapter will include a discussion on how these forms of expertise are used in investigations. What becomes apparent is that the review team were less likely to use external experts, preferring to draw on their own experience and areas of expertise, as well as that from colleagues from other neighbouring forces.

The figure of the victim is the sine qua non of the fight against impunity for international crimes. Engaging the victimological imagination of international criminal justice, the chapter shows how victims are represented, and how justice for victims is imagined. The first part focuses on imaginations of ‘justice for victims’, and argues that the ICC represents a form of hybrid justice by incorporating ‘restorative’ and ‘transformative’ rationales for justice. Unlike ordinary courts, the ICC incorporates what can be thought of as both ‘punitive’ and ‘reparative’ arms. Part of the latter is the Rome Statute’s provisions for victims’ rights to participation and reparation. However, a closer look at the implementation of these processes reveal a conspicuous discrepancy between ideologies and realities. The second part of the chapter situates victims as a source of moral authority, and one that is claimed in representational practices by both human rights NGOs and international criminal justice generally. The chapter explores suffering as a type of ‘currency’, both on an individual level for victims’ advocates, as their source of ‘purpose’, and on a broader cultural level as the source of ‘global’ moral outcry. The chapter demonstrates how the victim is culturally represented through imaginations from the global North and becomes universalized as a symbol of humanity, of which the gendered and racialized victim of sexual and gender-based violence provides particularly powerful victim imagery. In this way, the image of the victim of international crimes is characterized by her essential ‘otherness’: it is humanity that suffers.