Victims And Policy Making

This volume sets out to contrast and compare the development of policies related to victims of crime and their place within the criminal justice systems in nine separate jurisdictions (the USA, the Netherlands, England and Wales, Scotland, the Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa). Based on first hand interviews with those responsible for formulating such policies, as well as detailed grounded and document analysis across these jurisdictions, this book exposes the national and transnational policy networks surrounding victims of crime and, in particular, examines how the provision of victim care is becoming globalized.

Victims of crime are now the subjects of intense policy attention and reform across most developed nations, whilst also receiving sustained attention at the highest levels of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and many other transnational organizations. Such moves have been fostered by the continued development of the international victims' movement and driven by a host of complex and interacting drivers which span jurisdictions. This volume sets out to contrast and compare the development of policies related to victims of crime and their place within the criminal justice systems in nine separate jurisdictions (the USA, the Netherlands, England and Wales, Scotland, the Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa). Based on first hand interviews with those responsible for formulating such policies, as well as detailed grounded and document analysis across these jurisdictions, this book exposes the national and transnational policy networks surrounding victims of crime and, in particular, examines how the provision of victim care is becoming globalized. In so doing, it represents a rare comparative evaluation of the underlying rationales and influences which have influenced the creation of such policies and places them in their true global context.

Paul Rock began studying sociological criminology in 1961 and his intellectual history has run parallel to and in conversation with the evolution of the discipline over that long period. He became a professional scholar when symbolic interactionism, sociological phenomenology and 'labelling theory' were taking form within criminology, and it is to those ways of viewing the social world that he still clings, although he has sought also to reflect critically upon them as time went by. Having completed a DPhil dissertation on debt collection as a moral career, and largely as a matter of serendipity, he was to take to empirical research just as policies for victims of crime were being developed by governments across the developed world and, finding himself embedded as a visitor in a Canadian federal criminal justice ministry when a federal-provincial task force was being mooted, he was able to embark on the first of a sequence of field studies of policy-making centred chiefly on victims. Those two interlaced preoccupations, theoretical and empirical, continually informed much, if not all, of his subsequent work, contributing to what has been, in effect, a running series of comparative ethnographies of government decision-making about the role of the victim in and around the criminal justice system.

A critical examination of the dramatic changes in criminal justice over the last two decades and the first full-length study of the law and politics of criminal justice in the era of the Charter and victims? rights.

Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.