ABSTRACT
In this chapter, an analysis of corporate crime is used to probe and develop Christie's concept of the ideal victim. There are three types of corporate harm workplace death, injury and illness; food poisoning against consumers; and industrial pollution. The chapter argues that the victims of corporate crime are victims of particular sets of social relationships that cannot by understood using simplified concepts of 'crime' and 'victim'. The structuring context for The relationship between workers and their employer is the labour market in which she/he is forced to sell her/his labour in order sustain a livelihood or a particular standard of living. Exposure to pollution is also more accurately characterised as part of a wider set of social relationships that render poorer people more likely to be exposed to pollution. Women's structured vulnerability as consumers and as workers is central to understanding the unequal distribution of corporate crime victimisation along lines of class and gender.
