The role of the ‘victim’

While, as detailed in the previous chapter, the New Police gradually developed into the default mechanism for enforcing the law and apprehending criminals, this process took a long time and was only partially complete by the 1850s. This chapter deals with the role of the victim in the criminal justice process – a role which was initially far more instrumental than it is today. Our contemporary view of the nature of crime usually places the victim in a passive role in relation to a criminal act. This is not to say that victims are marginalized or ignored in our current conceptions of crime, but rather that they are not seen to have a particularly proactive role to play in either the prosecution or detection of crime. It is true that, during the 1950s, liberal reformers such as Margery Fry (1951) argued that ‘the injured individual [has] rather slipped out of the mind of the criminal court’ and successfully campaigned for Criminal Injuries Compensation for the victims of violent crime. However, although this led to a growing interest in the needs of victims, such campaigns were very much based on the view that ‘the suffering, and innocent victim of violence’ (Rock 1990: 84) should receive redress via the professional criminal justice system. Equally, the rise of ‘victimology’ (the study of victims of crime) since the 1950s has certainly raised the profile of victims, but has also arguably not altered substantially perceptions of victims as passive actors. As Miers (1978: 15) notes, the very term ‘victim’ inevitably promotes an image of passivity, where the victim has ‘traditionally been viewed as the ‘‘sufferer’’ in a simple ‘‘doer-sufferer’’ model of criminal interaction’.