Ideal Victim Research Articles

From Mathura to Farooqui Rape Case: The Regressive Patriarchy Found Its Way Back

Way back in 1972, a tribal girl was raped in custody by two constables in Desai Ganj Police Station in Maharashtra. The Supreme Court in Tuka Ram v State of Maharashtra (also known as Mathura’s rape case) acquitted the two accused policemen on the ground that the victim has raised no alarm, there was no visible injury mark on her person thereby it could be assumed that she has consented and not protested, she is habituated to sex, ‘she might have incited the two drunk policemen’ and therefore no rape is committed. Immediately after this verdict is pronounced, four legal luminaries, wrote an open letter to the Chief Justice of India protesting against the manner in which the accused have been acquitted and the concept of consent has been defined by the Court. Subsequently, the Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Act, No. 46 was introduced in the year 1983 and the provisions relating to rape law were amended. During the process, attempts were made to elaborate on the concept of consent, to put the onus of proving the guilt on accused rather than the victim, believing the victim’s version, emphasis on not taking into account the past sexual history of the victim during the trial and similar such reforms were made. Recently, the Supreme Court, while pronouncing its verdict in the Nirbhaya’s rape case too has upheld that the victim’s version alone is sufficient for the conviction of the accused. The progressive reforms, therefore, have been made in the rape laws until now, till the judgement delivered by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in the Jindal University rape case on 13th September 2017 as well as the one pronounced by the Delhi High Court in Mohd Faroouqi versus State (Govt of NCT of Delhi) on 27th September 2017, while neglecting the Nirbhaya’s case decision pronounced on 5th May 2017 and overlooking the reforms in the rape law, once again reopened the debate on consent in such cases and redefined what constitutes rape. Appalling attempts were made to dilute the provisions of the rape law. These two callous decisions by two different High Courts, one after the other, dismantled the concept of consent, ripped apart the framework of justice as well as dignity of women and made a dent on the concept of autonomy of a woman. These verdicts show that patriarchy still prevails and that the sexist misogynist mindset within the court rooms has not changed. The law embedded in patriarchal socio-cultural and sexual norms fails to see the rational logic and objectivity and negates to see the concept of consent in its wider perspective thus pushing down the regressive reasoning against which the women’s movement has painfully struggled for long. Both the High Courts, Delhi as well as Punjab and Haryana with their anti-women patriarchal and regressive views completely overturned the gains made in the arena of women’s rights by negatively and conservatively interpreting the definition of consent while reifying the old stereotype of an ideal rape victim, rape, resistance and consent. These verdicts have made a deep blow to the hard-won progressive advance and points to overt and covert backlash against gender friendly laws. This politics of backlash which highlights misuse and abuse of gender sensitive laws is much more evident in these judgements and needs to be countered and confronted by articulating and utilizing a radical understanding of feminist jurisprudence.

“To This Day She Continues to Struggle with the Terror Imposed upon Her”: Rape Narratives in Victim Impact Statements

This study locates the victim impact statements of raped women in the sociolegal context of significant sentencing law reforms introduced in Canada to address an ascendant victim’s rights movement. We examine 38 reported sentencing decisions in sexual assault cases in Ontario, Canada (1999–2010). Our objectives are to discern (a) whether the archetype of the ideal victim continues to influence juridical discourse after conviction and (b) what narratives of harm intersect with sentencing objectives and aggravating factors. Our findings suggest women express profound fear of re-victimization and traumatic effects of sexual violence regardless of the relational context of their rape experience. Most surprisingly, our data show sentencing judges view the sexual assault of an intoxicated rape victim as an aggravating factor. Future consideration for victim impact statements in sexual assault cases is discussed.

The case for a victimology of nonhuman animal harms

For the last twenty years ‘victimology’, the study of crime victims and victimisation has developed markedly. Like its ‘parent’ discipline of criminology, however, very little work has been done in this field around the notion of environmental victimisation. Like criminology itself, victimology has been almost exclusively anthropocentric in its outlook and indeed even more recent discussions of environmental victims – prompted by the development of green criminology – have failed to consider in any depth the victimisation of nonhuman animals. In this paper, we examine the shortfall in provision for and discussions of nonhuman animal victims with reference to Christie’s notion of the ‘ideal victim’ and Boutellier’s concept of the ‘victimalization of morality’. We argue that as victimology has increasingly embraced concepts of victimisation based on ‘social harms’ rather than strict legalistic categorises, its rejection of nonhuman victims from the ambit of study is no longer conceptually or philosophically justified.

Claiming someone else's pain: A grounded theory analysis of online community participants experiences of Munchausen by Internet

Munchausen by Internet (MbI) became increasingly visible in 2016 after several high-profile cases were reported in the media. It has not however received significant research interest. What is known about MbI is dependent on a series of case studies by Feldman (2000). The present study seeks to add a new perspective on MbI by analyzing the experiences of respondents with an intimate knowledge of the condition. Posts from 12 online communities by 556 respondents discussing MbI were collected, amounting to approximately 91,300 words. These were analyzed using grounded theory. The findings show that MbI perpetrators appear to advantage themselves by occupying 'ideal victim' personae. Despite this supposed sinister premeditation and the resultant emotional distress caused, an unexpected proportion of respondents were sympathetic towards the MbI perpetrators. However, the presence or possible presence of MbI eroded trust amongst participants and led to more reserved participation to prevent being duped or labelled as MbI perpetrators themselves. Both these strategies undermine the therapeutic benefits of online communities by restricting opportunities to confer normality and cultivate interpersonal support. There are no definitive clues available to identify the behavior and no deterrents to discourage it. New innovative methods are needed to tackle MbI and several tentative suggestions are made including a text classifier, reverse photo search filter and a more onerous membership screening processes.

Juvenile offender as a crime victim

There is a stereotype of an ideal victim that deserves attention and sympathy of the public because it is helpless and has not done anything to cause harm or damage inflicted on her. In real life, a victim can often have quite the opposite attributes and identities. Recent studies deal with the phenomenon of victim-offender overlap, or the circumstance in which an individual is the victim and the offender at the same time. Numerous authors state that offenders are more likely to become crime victims than non-offenders, while on the other hand, crime victims are more likely to become offenders than non-victims. This article provides an overview of some of the characteristics of the victim-offender overlap phenomenon in the context of adolescents, aiming to point out the theoretical determinants and practical implications of the relationship between offending and victimization of juveniles. Studying this relationship is a current topic in criminology and victimology, which also has applicative importance for making various decisions in juvenile justice system.

The Limits of Criminal Law And Justice ‘Revenge Porn’ Criminalisation, Hybrid Responses, And The Ideal Victim

This comment is a response to Alyse Dickson’s article in this volume entitled ‘Revenge Porn: A Victim Focused Response’. Part I considers the challenges that ‘revenge pornography’ raises and considers the difficulties of controlling aberrant sexualised conduct in circumstances where modern technology provides an almost limitless capacity to capture and distribute private images. Part II looks at the wider socio-cultural context, the gendered and sexualised assumptions of hetero-normativity and warns of the risks of overlooking ‘hidden’ individuals or groups that do not align with normative discourses of the ideal victim.

Stories of Victimization: Self-Positioning and Construction of Gender in Narratives of Abused Women.

The objective of this article is to analyze how women who have been victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) position themselves in relation to the image of the "ideal victim" and how gender is constructed in that positioning. There is a need for a gender analysis framework to understand how various forms of femininity are constructed and how narratives linked to this can either maintain a woman in an abusive relationship or encourage her to leave. Christie's theory of the "ideal victim" and Connell's gender theory are applied in this study, in which the narratives of 14 female IPV victims in Sweden are analyzed using a narrative method. Three strings of narratives, representing different forms of femininity, are revealed in the material. The master narrative of the ideal victim reveals a form of femininity that describes women as inferior in relation to men. In the alternative narrative, the narrator positions herself as inferior in relation to the offender but discusses resistance. She describes herself as a caring mother who risks a great deal to protect her children. In the counter-narrative, the narrator positions herself as strong and independent in relation to the offender and as a strong and caring mother. The positioning of different narrators may shift depending on the duration of the relationship and the type of violence. The narrator may also take different positions during different phases of the story. However, the dominant narrative among the narrators is the story of the caring mother, which may have several functions and can partially be understood as a sign of the strong discourse of motherhood in society. The study contributes to a more profound understanding of the complexity related to women's own positioning and reveals that awareness is required when attempting to understand the narratives and behavior of abused women.

Embodied victims: An archaeology of the ‘ideal victim’ of restorative justice

This article seeks to provide a historical-critical framework to reconstruct and discuss how the crime victim is portrayed within theoretical literature, policy and legal documents on restorative justice, with an emphasis on England and Wales. It first centres on a description of the most deep-rooted and wide-ranging discourses on the victim’s characteristics within restorative justice. Once these features have been organized into an ‘ideal’ model, the article traces the conditions which fed into its development, that is, the cultural context within which this model has emerged. The overall goal is not to test the ‘ideal victim’ within restorative justice, but rather to explore how this methodological tool, within a historical and critical approach, might help to shed light on some taken-for-granted assumptions of restorative justice and their legal, policy and practical implications, thus contributing to the critical assessment of this acclaimed “new frontier” of contemporary penality.

Editorial: Trafficking (in) Representations: Understanding the recurring appeal of victimhood and slavery in neoliberal times

Representations of trafficking and forced labour are pervasive within media, policymaking, and humanitarian debates, discourses and interventions. The terms exploitation and trafficking are increasingly used to characterise the work that migrants do in the sex industry and other irregular employment sectors. Of late, the notion of ‘modern slavery’ is on show in campaigns aiming to raise awareness about trafficking and funds for anti-trafficking initiatives among corporations and local enterprises as well as the general public. Celebrity interventions, militant documentaries, artistic works and fiction films have all become powerful vectors of the global distribution of the trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ rhetoric. These offer simplistic solutions to complex issues without challenging the structural and causal factors of inequality. Through fictional and narrow representations of ideal victims they tend to entrench racialised narratives and conflate all sex work with trafficking, which legitimates criminalising policies and interventions exacerbating the social vulnerability of sex workers. It is because of the under-researched role of representation in the development of anti-trafficking policies and initiatives that the Anti-Trafficking Review decided to devote a thematic issue on trafficking representations.

Business, victimisation and victimology

The recent publication of the first English/Welsh Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS) in over 10 years represents a good time to consider both ‘crimes against businesses’ and the place of commercial victims within the discipline of victimology. While some research points to high crime rates against the commercial sector, it has been argued that the abstract concept of ‘crimes against businesses’ has been used by government and businesses to construct a notion of business victimhood in order to place businesses at the centre of policy concerning crime prevention. Critics suggest this recognition of the ‘business as a victim’ not only moves attention away from the illegal behaviours of businesses (businesses as victimisers), but also it gives corporations that can already absorb crime costs the power to dominate debates around law, order and crime prevention. Using data from the CVS, patterns of crimes against business are outlined and some of the main characteristics of victims are identified. Consideration is then given to what these data mean in relation to the concept of businesses as victims. Using Christie’s notion of the ideal victim as a heuristic device, it is explored whether businesses can ever be viewed as ‘ideal’ victims and why achieving victim status might be important. Finally, some fruitful areas for further research are considered.

Constructing the ideal victim in the United States of America’s annual trafficking in persons reports

Human trafficking as a global phenomenon continues to elude accurate quantitative measure, and remains a controversial policy domain significantly influenced by anecdotal evidence. Drawing on the policy analysis framework of Bacchi (1999, Policy and Society, 26(3), 5–20, 2007) the problem representation of trafficking through narratives can be considered a direct antecedent of contemporary anti-human trafficking policy. This article explores the construction of human trafficking within the Trafficking in Persons Reports, published annually by the United States of America’s Department of State. An examination of the victim and offender narratives contained within the reports published between 2001 and 2012 demonstrates that human trafficking is predominantly represented as a crime committed by ideal offenders against idealized victims, consistent with Christie’s (1986) landmark criteria of ideal victimization. This representation of an ideal prototype has the potential to inform policy that diverts focus from the causative role of global socioeconomic injustice towards criminal justice policies targeting individual offenders.

Dangerous victimology: My lessons learned from Nils Christie

This article first discusses the key concepts of Nils Christie?s victimological-oriented work drawn from ?Conflicts as property? (1977) and ?The ideal victim? (1986). Using international criminal justice as an example, it demonstrates the enduring importance of Christie?s insights to victimology. Subsequently the paper offers a three-fold critique of Christie?s work. First, the stereotype of the ideal victim is confronted with the bodies of literature on the justice motive and the phenomenon of framing. Second, Christie?s views on the role of the state in ?Conflicts as Property? are discussed against the backdrop of libertarian and communitarian theories of political philosophy. Third, the notion that ?crime does not exist? is rebutted using a victimological perspective.

Appealing children: UK audiences’ responses to the use of children in humanitarian communications

Empathy, vulnerability and identification play an important role in the wish to protect children who are perceived to be helpless, blameless and therefore the ideal victim. This article offers an empirically based discussion of responses to humanitarian communications depicting children. Although most participants recognized that a communication involving a child has immediate impact, overall they displayed a reflexive and critical awareness of their own propensity to automatically empathize in response, with many expressing irritation for being manipulated. The study suggests that focusing exclusively on a de-contextualized and dyadic ‘audience-victim’ relationship offers only partial insight into audiences’ responses and reactions. Instead, it is argued that the usefulness of the use of children in humanitarian communication can be properly gauged only in the context of media saturation, audiences being sophisticated and media-savvy about appeals and communications, and a general attitude of distrust and dissatisfaction with the marketization of NGOs.

Constructing “Ideal Victim” Stories of Bosnian War Survivors

Previous research on victimhood during and after the Bosnian war has emphasized the importance of narratives but has not focused on narratives about victimhood or analyzed post-war interviews as a competition for victimhood. This article tries to fill this gap using stories told by survivors of the Bosnian war during the 1990s. In this analysis of the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the war in northwestern Bosnia, the aim is to describe the informants’ portrayal of “victimhood” as a social phenomenon as well as analyzing the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the category “victim”. When, after the war, different categories claim a “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories’ victim status are downplayed. In this reproduction of competition for the victim role, all demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war live on.

Still blaming the victim of intimate partner violence? Women’s narratives of victim desistance and redemption when seeking support

This article presents a theoretical examination of victims’ ( N = 28) experiences when trying to rebuild a victimization-free identity after having experienced multiple years of severe intimate partner violence (IPV). Narratives reveal experiences of victim-blaming attitudes when seeking help from informal and general formal support sources, which suggest that victims of IPV do not meet the criteria of the ‘ideal’, innocent victim worthy of ongoing formal and informal support. Drawing on criminological theories of redemption and desistance, in combination with victimological theories around social stigma and construction of the ‘ideal victim’, the study finds that victims often feel they have to redeem themselves as worthy of empathy in order to access ongoing support. These misplaced expectations of ‘desistance’ with the victim rather than the perpetrator highlight that the social stigma associated with IPV goes beyond the private nature of this type of violence and extends to victim behavior and decision making.

Girl power and ‘selfie humanitarianism’

The aim of this article is to examine the ‘turn to the girl’ and the mobilization of ‘girl power’ in contemporary global humanitarian and development campaigns. The paper argues that the ‘girl powering’ of humanitarianism is connected to the simultaneous depoliticization, corporatization, and neo-liberalization of both humanitarianism and girl power. Located in broad discussions of campaigns around Malala, Chime for Change and the Girl Effect, the paper seeks to understand the construction of girls as both ideal victims and ideal agents of change, and to examine the implications of this. It suggests that this shift is intertwined with what we call ‘selfie humanitarianism’ in which helping others is intimately connected to entrepreneurial projects of the self, and is increasingly figured less in terms of redistribution or justice than in terms of a makeover of subjectivity for all concerned. The structure of the paper is as follows. First we consider the literature about the depoliticization of humanitarian campaigns in the context of neoliberalism and the growing significance of corporate actors in the world of international aid and disaster relief. Next we examine similar processes in the commodification and export of discourses of ‘girl power’. We then argue that these have come together in the emerging ‘girl powering of development’ (Koffman and Gill 2013), a cocktail of celebratory ‘girlafestoes’ and empowerment strategies often spread virally via social media; celebrity endorsements; and corporate branding which stress that ‘I matter and so does she’ and elide the differences between pop stars and CEO of multinational corporations on the one hand, and girls growing up poor in the global South on the other. Our paper focuses on contemporary examples from the Girl Up campaign. The paper argues that far from being ‘post’ girl power, global humanitarian and development discourses constitute a new and instensified focus upon the figure of the girl and a distinctive, neo-colonial, neoliberal and postfeminist articulation of girl power.

Ideal victim and competition for victimhood in the stories of the survivors of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Previous research on victimhood often presented a one-sided picture of the ?victim? and the ?perpetrator?. Researchers have emphasised the importance of narratives and they have focused on narratives about victimhood, but they have not analysed post-war interviews as an arena for the competition for gaining the status of victim. This paper tries to fill-in this gap through analysing stories of 27 survivors of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s. The paper aims at describing the interviewees? portrayal of ?victimhood? as a social phenomenon, as well as to analyse those discursive patterns, which contribute to constructing the categories of a ?victim? and a ?perpetrator?. The research question is: How do the interviewees describe victimhood after the war? Within the dynamics that constructs the status of a ?victim? and a ?perpetrator? a competition for the role of a victim is noticeable after the war. All interviewees are eager to present themselves as victims, while at the same time they diminish the victim status of other categories. This situation can produce and reproduce competition for gaining the status of a victim, and, in this way, to reinforce collective demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war.

The challenges of visually representing poverty for international non-government organisation communication managers in New Zealand

This article explores the role played by local communication managers in how poverty is represented by four international non-government organisations (INGOs) operating in New Zealand. A critical-interpretative study, it examines how communication managers make decisions around what and how images should depict poverty in fundraising campaigns. The findings demonstrate how INGO communication managers are implicated in the highly simplistic social construction of ‘ideal victims’ of poverty, a typical Western representation which fails to communicate complex structural understandings of poverty, its causes, possible solutions, and the contexts in which it occurs. Communication managers explain that lack of resources and media logics, as well as the imperative to solicit donations, play a large part in determining how they visually depict poverty. Yet their own tacit and professional beliefs about the type of imagery which motivates donors are also highly complicit in image selection. The study identifies the considerable challenges that INGOs face in recognising their obligation to an ethics of care towards those who they represent in fundraising campaigns to alleviate poverty.

Judicial Narratives of Ideal and Deviant Victims in Judges’ Capital Sentencing Decisions

Although the Victim’s Rights Movement has led to advances for victims of crime, the use of victim impact evidence in criminal trials remains controversial due to the suspicion that such evidence enhances punitive attitudes and arbitrariness in capital sentencing outcomes. Despite a growing body of literature in this area, it remains unclear if some victims are viewed more favorably than others, particularly from the perspective of judges. The current study examines the construction of victims by judges in capital cases and how this portrayal impacts sentencing outcomes in Delaware, which vests the final capital sentencing authority in judges rather than juries. In examining this gap in the literature, we consider if judges make distinctions between ideal and deviant victims, if these distinctions are associated with victim and offender characteristics, and if the construction of victims impacts offender sentencing. Findings from this study lend support to the idea that judges describe some victims as more “worthy” than others, that victims described in ideal ways are more likely to be white and female, and that “ideal victims” are more likely to result in death sentences.

Who wants to be an ideal victim? A narrative analysis of crime victims' self-presentation

The aim of this article is to analyse how self-presentation is performed in victim narratives and what possible variant features are present in the narratives. This is examined by means of narrative analyses of face-to-face interviews with crime victims (n = 6). The narratives were grouped into two categories: 1) narratives about the crime victim as an established citizen, and 2) narratives about the crime victim as an outsider. How the narrators presented their status in society was relevant for how they understood the offender, the crime, and Victim Support. Importantly, the interviewed victims did not construe themselves as ‘ideal victims’ as they all projected personal strength in their self-presentations. Furthermore, the victim narratives normalized (rather than idealized) the victim while construing the offender as in need of treatment. The article concludes by discussing future research needs and the role of victim self-presentations for psychological well-being and trust in the criminal justice system.