Drizzling sympathy: Ideal victims and flows of sympathy in Swedish courts

Nina Törnqvist

doi:10.1177/02697580211035586

Abstract

By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal interaction order in court.

Highlights

The judicial ideals of objectivity and impartiality are closely associated with dispassion (Maroney, 2011) and there are few professional arenas in which the ideological division between rationality and emotion is today as profound and robust as in the legal arena
The following quote from a judge in an appellate court can illustrate how sympathy is carefully carved into the legal actors’ experiences of the criminal justice process: Q: How did you feel when the deliberations were over? What feeling did you have when you went from the [deliberation] room and back to the office?
By stressing the need to be sympathetic towards the involved parties, the judge connects with general, societal sympathy rules, shielding himself from becoming, or being perceived as, cynical and callous

Summary

Introduction

The judicial ideals of objectivity and impartiality are closely associated with dispassion (Maroney, 2011) and there are few professional arenas in which the ideological division between rationality and emotion is today as profound and robust as in the legal arena. Many scholars in this field have shown how empathy enhances objectivity and professionalism among legal actors (Bandes, 2009; Roach et al, 2005; Westaby and Jones, 2018; Wettergren and Bergman Blix, 2016). Empathy is considered to be crucial both when assessing and when anticipating people’s acts and rationales and when managing one’s own and others’ emotions in court (Wettergren and Bergman Blix, 2016). As this paper will show, sympathy can assume multifaceted meanings in the legal context: as promoting involvement, and as affecting evaluations of victim status, threatening impartiality and professionalism. The main aim of this article is to explore the forms and flows of sympathy in court by investigating how victim status invokes care and concern among legal actors

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