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Research has long demonstrated that victim-survivors of intimate partner violence face barriers to being believed when they seek help via the legal system and are simultaneously at risk of their abuser weaponizing the legal system against them. This article draws on the experiences of 54 women victim-survivors of coercive control in Australia who had experienced legal systems abuse within criminal and civil protection order systems. Drawing on feminist legal theory, we highlight that the legal system continues to disbelieve women and validate abusers. These experiences hold implications for victim-survivor views on the merits and risks of criminalizing coercive control., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

In December 2015, the criminal offence of coercive control was introduced in England and Wales. Whilst, in this legislation, this concept is presumed to be gender-neutral, there is widespread agreement that coercive control is gendered. Using empirical data gathered in one police force area in the South of England, this paper offers an exploration of the feasibility of the extent to which existing risk assessment practices and understandings of risk embedded within them, can incorporate the phenomenon of coercive control. The findings highlight concerns about gender-blind, incident-led (rather than process-led) approaches to assessing risk when these approaches are set against victim/survivor concerns. These concerns highlight the inherent problems embedded in the contemporary gender-blind embrace of the concept of risk as assumed in practices of risk assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, victims' voices have been increasingly heard and have been influential in policy debates. Since that time, the nature and presence of those voices has changed shape and form from the influence and presence of victim centred organizations to the rise of the high profile individual victim. The purpose of this article is to explore the presence of one victim's story, Rosie Batty, and to examine her influence on the rise of the policy agenda on family violence in Australia. This article considers the ways in which this story gained traction and influenced the reform of family violence policy in Australia, and considers the extent to which an understanding of this process contributes to an (emergent) narrative victimology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the questions posed for criminology when war and terror are seen through a gendered lens. Following Barberet this lens demands blurring the boundaries between peace-time, war-time and post-conflict situations. These boundaries frame the nomos of criminology and once challenged the connections to be made between the ‘callousness’ of femicide and the ‘callousness’ of environmental destruction are exposed. Using photographs as the vehicle through which such a challenge can be maintained, the gendered analysis that follows poses conceptual and methodological questions for the discipline which ultimately demands a reimagining of the contribution of criminology and victimology to understanding gendered violence(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beck (2015: 81) observes, metamorphosis 'is proceeding latently, behind the mind walls of unintended side effects, which are being constructed as 'natural' and 'self-evident'. Thus Beck's concept of metamorphosis conceives of social change as unnoticed and unacknowledged. Such change is evident in the contemporary ever present invocation of the 'victim' in a wide range of different, crime-soaked circumstances. This paper is concerned to explore this metamorphosis of the 'victim' in reflecting on two narratives: the victim narrative and the trauma narrative. The contemporary conflation of these two narratives has led Agamben (1999: 13) to suggest that policy has proceeded as if '"testis" (the testimony of a person as a third party in a trial or a law suit) can be conflated with "superstes" (a person who has lived through something and can thereby bear witness to it)'. The paper makes the case that this conflation has consequences for understandings of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I reflect upon the legacy of the work of Jock Young for the development of a critical criminology. In doing this I also endeavour to offer a contribution to an internal history of both criminology and victimology but from a very particular, and personal, position. The paper falls into four parts. In the first I consider the time period from 1980-1997 and academic, political and policy debates therein. I have called this a time of 'emergent optimism'. The second part considers the years from 1997-2007 in which this optimism was subjected to challenge. The third part considers 2007 to date and the challenges that remain for both criminology and victimology in the absence of the voice of Jock Young. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victimology, following in the train of criminology, is starting to incorporate genocide into its research and theory. How will this new direction affect understandings of genocide, and how might it reshape victimology itself? We begin by proposing a new term, victimality, to indicate a group’s potential for victimization by genocide and other atrocity crimes. Then we rework two of victimology’s traditional concepts – victim precipitation and victim proneness – to show how they might be used to analyse the dynamics of genocidal processes. We apply the three concepts to the Armenian genocide of 1915 and suggest ways in which victimologists might engage further with the crime of all crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author analyzes the work of American sociologist Richard Quinney on cultural victimology taking the question, who is the victim of crime. The article examines different ways of victimology tracing the coexistence of interrelated narratives on criminal victimization. Several suggestions offering a window of opportunity for the development of cultural victimology are discussed.

The article looks at the state of cultural victimology through the repatriation of deceased British troops at Wootton Bassett who had served in the Afghan War on Terror since 2001. It explores 3 cultural trends that described the British Royal Air Force base in Afghanistan including an integration of private and public grief, gothicism, and images of resistance. The repatriation was documented by photographer Stuart Griffiths, which described the deceased soldiers as war victims.

The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which studies of criminal victimization have contributed to this presumption of human vulnerability, and to examine the potential in understandings of resilience for overcoming this presumption. In order to do this the argument falls into three parts. In the first part I shall consider the different ways in which victimization and vulnerability have been linked together. In the second I shall examine the concept of resilience and its relationship, if any, with vulnerability and victimization. Throughout this discussion I shall draw on feminist informed work as a way of suggesting a differently oriented approach to both of these concepts: presented here as thinking otherwise. In the final and concluding part of this article the implications of contemporary understandings of these concepts will be situated within the broader policy context characterized by Aradau (2004) as informed by a ‘politics of pity’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I am concerned to document the ways in which ordinary and mundane experiences of criminal victimisation, alongside the more widely publicised threats posed by terrorist activities, transgress our everyday sense of well-being and in the light of this to consider the range policy responses that have been put in place. Consequently the paper falls into three parts. In the first I shall endeavour to offer a critical evaluation of recent policy efforts that have been made to place the victim at the centre of criminal justice policy. In the second part I shall trace the return to the Gothic, the increasingly public pre-occupation with suffering, discernable within these policy processes. In the third and concluding section, I shall consider some aspects of the implications of these developments for questions of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explore the interconnections between different strands of victimological thought, their relationship with the contemporary victims' policy scene and the relevance of this work for community justice. In so doing the argument will be developed that in order to understand contemporary policy concerns it is necessary to situate those concerns within the wider changing relationship between the citizen and the state and the extent to which that changing relationship has resulted in the politicisation of the crime victim. Particular attention will be paid to the re-orientation of the probation service, the introduction of the victim personal statement scheme, and the contemporary use of restorative justice, as policy examples currently concerned with the victim of crime. The conclusion will draw out some of the implications of policy orientations of this kind for the field of community justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The `fear of crime' has been at the centre of political and policy debate for some time. The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the continued relevance of that debate in the light of findings from an in-depth two and a half year research project. The findings from that project suggest that the relation people have with crime, criminal victimization, and the fear of crime is mediated by the relevance of their relationship with their local community and their structural position within that community. Understanding the nature of these relationships suggests the question of trust is of greater value in highlighting who is and who is not afraid of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses some of the domain assumptions of victimology. There are three tendencies within victimological debate, the conservative, the liberal, and the radical-critical. The conservative focuses on victims of street crime, is concerned to render people accountable for their actions, encourages self-reliance, and finally foregrounds retributive justice. This tendency is extended in the liberal stance by the inclusion of crimes of the suites within the substantive remit of the discipline. The radical critical tendency extends the focus of the discipline even further by including all forms of human suffering in its analyses and by considering the criminal justice process, the law,and the state as a part of the construction of that suffering.