Revisiting the 'Ideal Victim': Developments in Critical Victimology

REVISITING THE ‘IDEAL VICTIM’
Contents
List of abbreviations
Notes on contributors
	Editor
	Contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword: thinking beyond the ideal
Preface
Introduction
	Background to the book
	Outline of the collection
The Ideal Victim
	On being a victim
	The ideal victim
	The non-ideal victim
	The ideal and the not-so-ideal offender
	Ideal victims, real victims and scared victims
	Victims and social conditions
Part 1. Exploring the ‘Ideal Victim’
1. The ideal victim through other(s’) eyes
	Stereotypes and moral typecasting
	The justice motive and framing
	Conclusion
2. Creating ideal victims in hate crime policy
	Introduction
	Constructing hate crime policy
	The victim’s weakness
	Engagement in a respectable project
	Blamelessness
	The big and bad offender
	The unknown offender
	Power and influence
	Constructing deserving victims
	Concluding thoughts
3. The lived experiences of veiled Muslim women as ‘undeserving’ victims of Islamophobia
	Introduction
	Stigmatisation of veiled Muslim women
	State policies criminalising the wearing of the veil
	The research study
	Secondary victimisation in the criminal justice system
	Conclusion
4. Being ‘ideal’ or falling short? The legitimacy of lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender victims of domestic violence and hate crime
	Introduction
	Christie’s ideal victims and offenders: binaries and blind spots
	Less-than-ideal victims: LGB and/or T people experiencing DVA
	Problematising a femininity predicated on victimhood
	LGB and/or T hate crime victimisation
	Conclusion
5. New victimisations: female sex worker hate crime and the ‘ideal victim’
	New victimisations and the inclusion of the non-ideal victim into the criminal justice process
	Defining victims – the multiple identities of female sex workers
	New victimisations – hate crime and hate crime laws
	New victimisations – female sex workers and hate crime
	The ideal victim concept
6. The ‘ideal migrant victim’ in human rights courts: between vulnerability and otherness
	Who are the vulnerable migrants?
	Idealising a vulnerable migrant victim
	Challenging vulnerability: a doubly exclusionary mechanism?
	Exclusion by misrecognition
	Exclusion by recognition
	Conclusion: rescuing vulnerability?
7. ‘Our most precious possession of all’1: the survivor of non-recent childhood sexual abuse as the ideal victim?
	Introduction
	The recognition of legitimate suffering
	The monstrous abuser
	Contesting the ‘ideal’ status of victims of non-recent childhood sexual abuse
	Conclusion
8. ‘Idealising’ domestic violence victims
	Introduction
	Domestic violence victimisation and prevention
	The Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme
	Victim responsibilisation
	Attributing blame
	Risk enhancement
	Conclusion: contradictions to the ‘ideal victim’ concept
9. Environmental crime, victimisation, and the ideal victim
	Introduction
	The victim in the context of environmental justice
	Defining victimisation: workers and communities as non-ideal victims
	Corporations as monsters and non-ideal offenders
	Victimisation from environmental governance
	Conclusion
Part 2. Exploring the ‘Non-Ideal’ Victim
10. Revisiting the non-ideal victim
	Introduction
	Christie’s (non-)ideal
	Expanding the concept of the non-ideal
	Qualitative evidence
	Psychological explanations
	Conclusion
11. Conceptualising victims of anti-social behaviour is far from ‘ideal’
	Introduction
	Contextualising and understanding ASB victimisation
	Conceptualising victims of ‘personal’ anti-social behaviour
	Conceptualising communities as victims of anti-social behaviour
	Concluding thoughts
12. The ‘ideal’ rape victim and the elderly woman: a contradiction in terms?
	Introduction
	Background
	The ‘real-rape’ stereotype and the ‘ideal victim’
	The ‘ideal’ older rape victim
	Challenging the stereotype
	Conclusion
13. Denying victim status to online fraud victims: the challenges of being a ‘non-ideal victim’
	Introduction
	Defining a ‘victim’
	A brief history of victimology and the ‘ideal’ victim
	Online fraud in context
	Applying the ‘ideal victim’ framework
	Summary of the five characteristics in the context of online fraud
	The implications of ‘non-ideal’ victim status
	Conclusion
14. Male prisoners’ vulnerabilities and the ideal victim concept
	Introduction
	Male prisoners, vulnerability and victim status
	Male prisoners as vulnerable
	Victims of structural violence
	Conclusion
15. A decade after Lynndie: non-ideal victims of non-ideal offenders – doubly anomalised, doubly invisibilised
	Introduction
	The ideal victim - new concept, old construct, enduring problem: the ideal victim binary/ies as a normative taxonomy
	The ideal victim taxonomy and discursive equilibrium: the stubborn persistence of the gendered binary in sexual violence
	Concluding thoughts
16. Towards an inclusive victimology and a new understanding of public compassion to victims: from and beyond Christie’s ideal victim
	Introduction
	Human suffering, compassion and crime victims
	Which victims? The ‘ideal victim’ as an object of compassion
	Politics of compassion
	Taking compassion seriously: new paths for victimology
	Some concluding thoughts: towards a more inclusive victimology
Conclusion
Index