ABSTRACT
In recent years both the idea of the victim, and the material structures through which victimisation is defined, have increasingly been shaped and influenced by cultural forces. To grasp both the processes through which meanings are attributed to victims and the institutional networks that emerge in response to victimhood, due consideration needs to be given to the cultural framework within which notions of criminality and victimisation are located. In this contribution dominant understandings of criminal victimisation are situated in the contemporary context and analysed in relation to broader macro-social shifts. Drawing primarily on examples from the UK, the changing place of the victim in society is considered through an evaluation of prevalent political discourses, media representations and established modes of crime control. The chapter is underpinned by the belief that victimology requires a robust theoretical framework to broach current problems and issues surrounding the place and role of the victim in the criminal justice process. In order to advance research in the area of cultural victimology, it begins by addressing the relationship between given understandings of the victim and the operation of cultural processes. Having highlighted the gravitation towards culture within criminology, it goes on to explore the ways in which the media represents and influences the range – and, moreover, the narrowness – of meanings commonly attributed to victims. From here, the cultural construction of the terrorist threat in the UK is utilised as a way of tapping into the institutional tendency to use the figurehead of the victim as a way of organising and regulating social activity. Centring on the shaping of ‘new terrorism’, the chapter elucidates how cultural institutions play a major role in defining crime risks and circulating dominant ideas about victimisation. The example of ‘new terrorism’ is used to bring into view current debates about the ‘risk society’ and the generation of a ‘culture of fear’. By unpicking the work of Beck and Furedi, I suggest ways in which the cultural can be more firmly factored into victimology. Having scrutinised both the utility and
the limitations of these macro theories, I move on to discuss how the cultural issues that remain might meaningfully be addressed in the future. In the final section some speculative comments are made on the ways in which the hegemonic discourse of ‘new terrorism’ feeds contemporary imaginings of the universal victim and reveals the explicitly political uses to which the crime victim is being put. However, before looking at these possibilities, it is first necessary to consider the evolving meaning of the victim and to highlight the conceptual movement toward culture within criminology.
