Men's Violence, Victim Advocacy, and Feminist Redress

Abstract

Stuart Scheingold, Toska Olson, and Jana Pershing (1994) draw from interviews with 15 people, including 5 leaders of victim advocacy organizations and 7 members of the state legislature, to show how a punitive ethos played itself out in legislation to control sexual violence. The lesson learned from Washington State's Community Protection Act (CPA) of 1989 is that members of victim advocacy organizations and grassroots social movements may practice a conservative law-and-order politics toward crime and justice. Scheingold et al. place their study within the terms of a debate, which they say has two sides. On one side are “republican and some feminist criminologists,” who “are sympathetic to victim advocacy because they see victims as natural spokespersons for republican/feminist values and policies” (p. 730). The other side contains liberals of various types, “including civil libertarians, just desert theorists, and others not readily identifiable with any general theory” (p. 734), “who see victim advocacy and/or republican criminology as a threat to the integrity of the criminal process” (p. 730). The authors conclude that while the Washington State victim advocates were both active players and pawns of politicians, “the net effect of victim advocacy is … substantially problematic for republican/feminist values and for sound crime control policy as well” (p. 731).