The 'Ideal' Victim

Victimhood

  • Focus on harm

  • Should be recognised irrespective of CJ engagement or outcomes

  • Can be a direct or indirect victim

    • Family and friends may be labelled as secondary victims

    • People who intervene or assist or are involved in the aftermath may be labelled as tertiary victims

Levels of victims’ guilt

  • Mendelsohn’s victims typology

    1. Completely innocent

    2. Minor guilt

    3. As guilty as the offender

    4. More guilty than offender

    5. Most guilty victim

    6. Imaginary victim

Von Hentig — psychological calsses of victims

  1. The depressed — lacks ordinary prudence and discretion and has a secret and subconscious desire to be annihilated

  2. The acquisitive — lacks normal inhibitions and well-founded suspicions because of a desire for money

  3. The wanton — feminine foibles play a role such women take the bait of their sensual disposition. Von Hentig explains that the sensuality of a girl is often intensified by climatic influences and the fact that the girl is just indisposed.

Victim culpability

  • Trying to understand why some people are more likely to be victimised than others. What is it about their behaviour that provokes victimisation

  • Wolfgang developed a theory measuring victim culpability. The victim and the offender re both separate entities and ‘mutual participants’

  • While offender / victim dynamics may be worth analysing, the issue with these early theoretical perspectives is: they focus on trying to find what the victim did wrong

  • These ideas are still used within the CJS in attempts to prove defendants innocent.

Victim blaming approach

  • Early work in victimology and psychology looking at sexual offences tended to take a victim blaming approach

  • Amir suggested that offenders and victims are mutually interacting patterns. the female partner sometimes encourages rape when she uses what could be interpreted as indecency in language and gestures, or constitutes what could be taken as invitation to sexual relations

The ideal victim

  • Christie’s ideal victim — a person or a category of individuals who most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of being a victim

    1. Weak

    2. blameless

    3. engaged in a respectable project

      • eg charity work

    4. no relationship with offender

    5. Offender is big and bad

The ideal victim and victim blaming

  • stereotypes of the ideal victim form the foundations of victim myths, such as rape myths

  • Victims must be weak compared to the offender

  • In reality offenders are also victims