ABSTRACT
This chapter contextualises the place of victims in society in previous centuries using modern and contemporary source material and attempts to describe the beginnings of interest in victims by academics and policy makers – interest which later came later to be termed 'victimology'. In doing this, it illustrates the confused and contradictory position that victims have occupied as both symbolic and real actors in the detection and prosecution of crime and in the public conception of the crime 'problem'. The chapter presents a picture of gradual, piecemeal and apparently marginal changes in the role of victims vis-a-vis the State in criminal prosecutions. Before the late nineteenth century, the victim provided the evidence, the impetus and the financial means to the detection and prosecution of crime. After the Second World War, the power of symbolic construction of victims has grown stronger, and could be said to drive governmental policy to an unprecedented degree.
