ABSTRACT
The chapters in Part Two, while dealing in different ways specifically with the relationship between gender and criminal victimisation, by implication also raised more general questions pertaining to criminal justice policy and service delivery in relation to victims of crime per se. Women’s experiences of the criminal justice process have historically pointed up the inadequacies in that process in responding to them as a specific group of victims. Yet as research as shown, aspects of their experiences are often shared with others as they negotiate their experience of criminal victimisation and their treatment by the criminal justice process. Indeed, as Rock documented in Chapter 2, particular studies in the UK, like those of Shapland et al. (1985) and Maguire and Bennett (1982), were influential in encouraging a closer look at the more ordinary and mundane experience of the criminal justice process for the victim of crime, from the response of the police to experience of giving evidence in court. In recent years much political and policy energy has been devoted to addressing these general experiences of the criminal justice system epitomised in particular by the government White Paper Justice for All published in 2002 and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004. Indeed, the latter introduced some significant changes to how crime victims might be responded to. The Code of Practice for Victims of Crime, which was introduced as part of this legislation and became effective in April 2006, codifies all the expectations and obligations that a victim might have of the criminal justice system and sets targets for how and when the criminal justice agencies need to have responded to and/or delivered services to them.
