ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen an increasing role for victims of crime in the criminal justice procedure (Groenhuijsen and Letschert 2008). This is evident in legislation and practice, in adversarial and inquisitorial systems and at the national and international level. Where in the 1970s the victim may have been correctly viewed as the forgotten party of the criminal justice process, this is no longer an accurate description in many jurisdictions. The ‘emancipation’ of victims of crime (Van Dijk 2009) has been felt far beyond the criminal justice system. In sociological and philosophical analyses of Western society at the dawn of the twenty-first century the victim is often considered to be a central figure (Nolan 1998; Boutellier 2002; Furedi 2004). Richard Rorty (1989), for instance, is well known for finding ‘Are you suffering?’ to be the central moral question of our times.
