‘Respectable’ victims and safe solutions: the hidden politics of victimology?
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Keywords
victim, crime, Ireland, revictimisation, experience of victims
Abstract
This paper offers a critique of the dominance that victim discourse has come to occupy in debates about criminal justice in Ireland. It argues that such a discourse works with an unacceptably simplistic notion of the term ‘victim’, it can lead to reforms that result in revictimisation rather than victim empowerment and it distorts the experiences of many crime victims for whom victimisation is inconvenient rather than traumatic.