ABSTRACT
For some years a central claim of criminal justice policy has been to ‘make sure that the victim’s voice is heard at the heart of Government’ (Home Office 2005: 8; see generally Rock 2004: chapter 10). Not the least of the reasons that has accompanied its restatement has been the perceived need to redress the system’s balance in the victim’s favour. The use of this metaphor is a contentious matter that goes beyond this chapter’s scope (Henderson 1985; Wood 2005), but it figured prominently in the 1960s when the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme (‘the Scheme’) was first introduced in Great Britain. The massive changes that have taken place over the past 40 years in the relationship between victims of crime and the criminal justice system are well documented (Sanders 1999; Hoyle and Zedner 2006).1 Of particular note are the government’s efforts to give meaning to the principle that as the guilty party is the offender, ‘in an ideal world, it should be the offender who compensates the victim’ (Home Office 2005: 14). The making of compensation orders against offenders as an element of or possibly the only sentence may in part satisfy that idealism, as may such long-standing devices as restitution and reparation,2 and its more recent promotion of restorative justice (Miers and Semenchuck 2005). Within this response, the Scheme, which was placed on a statutory footing in 1995, now constitutes a central feature (Home Office 2005: 6-12). The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority currently awards around £170 million a year (CICA 2003: 9; 2006b: 5), and since 1964 more than £3 billion has been awarded to approximately 960,000 successful applicants under the Scheme’s various terms.
