ABSTRACT
For much of the twentieth century, the victim of crime was either ignored in criminological debates or portrayed as a marginal and passive figure in the criminal justice system (Hoyle and Young 2002: 526). As Miers (1978: 15) noted, the very term ‘victim’ inevitably promotes an image of passivity, where the victim has ‘traditionally been viewed as the “sufferer” in a simple “doersufferer” model of criminal interaction’. This perception has (notwithstanding growing debates about the role of the victim in restorative justice), become something of a ‘given’ in modern criminology, although essays in this collection will go a long way towards reassessing that view. Historical research has provided a measure of empirical evidence to challenge the ‘marginality’ of victims in past centuries. However, debates about the historical position and importance of victims in the criminal justice process have had to be pieced together from disparate sources. Victims make an appearance in essays on the development of policing services, descriptions of change in the prosecution process, but only as bit-part actors. If Rude’s opinion in 1985 that historical research had pretty much bypassed victims is now looking a little dated, it is certainly true that victims, and the part they have played in the operation of the criminal justice system, are not well served by historians (see Rude 1985: 76). However, let us start with something positive. There are some recent publications that have significantly increased our knowledge, and described concepts that help to make sense of the role of the victim. Rock’s (2004) exploration of the development of the state’s prosecution apparatus has been added to King’s work on victims’ use of the law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (King 1984, 2000; and see Storch 1975, 1976); Kirchengast (2006) has attempted recently to produce a Foucauldian account of the history and development of the crime victim, and some crime history textbooks now contain chapters on victims as prosecutors (Emsley 2005; Godfrey and Lawrence 2005).2 This chapter presents further knowledge and contextualises the place of victim in society in previous centuries; and
attempts to describe the beginnings of interest in victims by academics and policy-makers – interest that later came to be termed ‘victimology’. In doing this, we illustrate 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’.3
