Until the latter half of the 20th century the criminal justice system seems to had taken victims of crime for granted. And, like anything else that is taken for granted, by time they were overlooked and forgotten. Their existence became ephemeral to the whole justice process. Frankly speaking, in some jurisdictions more than others, they unfortunately still get a ‘worse deal’ than the accused unto this very day. We shall be examining why this is so in five successive steps. First of all, it would be important to see out of which particular socio-political matrix interest in victims and their rights grew. We shall note, in this context, that, properly speaking, the original key concept guiding such growing interest was almost certainly not to give a ‘better deal’ to victims, but more precisely to regulate better sentencing practices. Secondly, we ought to recognise that, during the last few decades, a genuine effort was made to quantify victims and gauge the real impact of crime. Here again, we shall be noting that this effort was most likely done more for the sake of crime prevention than to work out a ‘better deal’ for victims within the justice process. Thirdly, we must consider why some still contend that victims, as opposed to the accused, can have only needs, but no rights. We shall note here that this attitude may be the understandable result of criminal justice practictioners working within a system pulled together in order to prosecute, and thus a system built around a punitive paradigm that automatically gives a ‘worse deal’ to victims in relation to the accused. Fourthly, we will see that these needs of victims are predominantly being met by support services that lie outside the criminal justice system. We shall note, however, that, being what they are, such services confirm, rather than challenge or refute, the punitive paradigm. In so doing they really contribute little to improving victims’ ‘deal’ by the justice process. Finally, we will take into account the fact that within the system victims still suffer from unfair treatment through ‘secondary victimisation’. We shall note here that this is just an explicable extension of the overall ‘bad deal’ that victims have from a system that continues to see them as mere pawns in a justice process that is almost solely interested in prevention, prosecution and sentencing.

Interest in victims by academic criminologists, criminal justice practitioners and policy-makers emerged in the 1980s as a result, first, of social and political pressures and, secondly, of a growing need to quantify victimisation. Taking the former cause for the time being, it must be observed that one of the most important ‘political’ pressures exerted in order to move away from researching offenders and concentrate on victims was simply lack of financial resources. This had been brought on by a shift in funding policies (Maguire, 2000: 128–9), and it was obviously coupled to a new attitude adopted by policy-makers in response to expediency. As a matter of fact, James and Raine (1998: 23) point out that government (particularly in Britain) could simply not afford to ignore the ‘clear shift’ in the attitude of the public towards crime. People were experiencing a surge of street crime, and they were loosing confidence in public agencies. Consequently, for the sake of popularity, methods and ‘official’ attitudes towards crime had to change in order to give people at least a sense of being given due attention. The progressive withdrawal of funds by policy-makers from offender-based, to victim-based, researches in reality expressed a ‘profound anxiety about loss of social order’ (Ibid.: 106). This ‘social disturbance’ could be easily discerned in the growing outcry and intensity of victim-oriented self-help groups that wanted to ‘regain a sense of control over their lives through practical assistance, mutual support, and involvement in the criminal justice process’ (Karmen, 2001: 4). Such disquieting restlessness had manifestly moved quite ahead of the scholarly thought given thirty years before to crime victims by Hans von Hentig, the so-called ‘father’ of victimology (Adler et al., 1995: 397, 44; Zedner, 2002: 420).

What is important to note here, however, is that most of this clamour was originally intended to force the authorities’ hand in awarding harsher court sentences. This perhaps did indeed help victims to cease being the ‘forgotten actors’ anymore in the criminal justice process (Ibid.: 419), but it is debatable whether it promoted them to becoming key players in that same process. This would have meant the reorientation of criminal justice towards the victim, or better a shift in penological thinking that challenges the prevailing paradigm of retributive punishment (Ibid.).

The original key concept, than, guiding the growing interest in the victim of crime was almost certainly not to give a ‘better deal’ to victims, but more precisely to regulate better sentencing practices. The criminal process, in fact, while granting some cosmetic breathing space to victims, only refined itself in such a way as to give the accused a yet ‘better deal’ than before.

Apart of social and political pressures, we have seen above that interest in victims by academic criminologists, criminal justice practitioners and policy-makers emerged also as a result of a growing need to quantify victimisation. Keeping better official statistics, and conducting victim surveys and self-report studies have met that need. The principal aim of all of these data-gathering applications is to understand crime and, if possible, prevent it from happening (Karmen, 2001: 42). It is clear, than, that quantification of victims’ experiences is not about victims but rather about offenders (Hagan, 1985: 99). Victims are used as a means of tapping information about criminal deviance. Mayhew (2000: 97–8) mentions five main purposes of victim surveys, all of which are directly or indirectly related to crime-prevention. They are: first, to provide an alternative measure of crime to offences recorded by the police; secondly, to look at levels of reporting to the police and why crimes are not reported; thirdly, to give information on crime risks in a way police figures allow much less well; fourthly, to flesh out the nature of victimisation from crime; and finally, to take up other crime-related issues.

Wolfgang (1971, quoted in Feldman, 1993: 24) listed similar purposes in relation to official statistics, although here other additional factors come into play, such as cost effectiveness of crime-prevention and enforcement policies. In any case, victim quantification is only obliquely related to giving victims some ‘better deal’ within the criminal justice process. Any information gathered in whatever way about their victimisation is, on the contrary, directly and mainly related to the formulation of theories that may better explain the onset of crime or to the development of social policies that facilitate the control or elimination of crime (Siegel, 1998: 46). It may be even said that, though victim-based research and studies use victims as their main source to gather information about offenders, it is generally only indirectly and as a logical side-effect that information about the victims themselves comes out (Rock, 2000: 66). Victims are not the main object of interest. And neither is their better standing in the criminal justice process the main objective. Victim involvement in quantification processes was, and still is, offender-centred and offender-oriented (Adler et al., 1995: 44–6). This may not be immediately evident, especially if, while conducting their surveys, researchers claim to be chiefly interested in profiling the victims themselves (Williamson, 2003: 223). In most of such cases, the underlying intent is crime prevention just the same. The victim is used as a tool for ulterior reasons. Furthermore, in almost all cases, using victims as informants is convenient in order to gauge public views and opinions (Maguire, 2002: 327). Ultimately, this is done not only to undermine deviant behaviour (Haralambos, 1995: 399–401) but, more significantly, to facilitate social control (Levi and Maguire, 2002: 803).

This does not mean that victim surveys in general did not regenerate criminological interest in victims. It evidently did (Zedner, 2002: 421). However, only in a roundabout way. In all probability, the quantification of victimisation was not, and maybe still is not, conducted for the sake of the victim, for some ‘better deal’ for victims within the justice process, or for acknowledging and protecting their due rights. In fact, most academic criminologists, criminal justice practitioners and policy-makers would still question whether victims have rights at all. In the UK, for instance, the Victim Charter offers little by way of enforceable rights (Reeves and Mulley, 2001, in Zedner, 2002: 435). Its constant use of much ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ meaningfully speaks for itself. Furthermore, the Charter even spread a false impression, for it appeared to be offering substantive rights when in reality it merely conferred procedural rights (James and Raine, 1998: 69). In Malta, on the contrary, the equivalent of the UK’s Charter is called Guide to Victims (Victim Support Malta, www.mddmalta.org, 2004), and is explained as ‘a statement for the rights of victims of crime’ (Ibid., italics mine). In Malta, just like in the UK, victims do not have legally enforceable ‘rights’. In real terms, what the Victim Charter has sought to do is to ‘recast’ the victim as a ‘consumer’, by empowering them to play a role in measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of the different criminal justice agencies. But this is only another subtle tactic for the systematic political manipulation of crime victims. All of this is significantly different from the actual and many rights of victims recognised in the US by academics (Siegel, 1998: 92), by the majority of states (Adler et al., 1995:398–9), and especially by the amazing 1990 ‘Bill of [Victims’] Rights’ enshrined in the constitution of Arizona (Schmalleger, 1996: 296–7).

Lack of formal rights by victims in most jurisdictions obviously shows in the persistent ‘bad deal’ they get within the justice process. In the UK, as in Malta (Brienen and Hoegan, 2000: 638), the victim’s rights are subordinated to the nature and goals of the criminal process and the public interest. Most unpleasant still is the fact that the formal rights of the defendant actually exceed those of the victim. Appalling as this might appear, in jurisdictions where victims’ rights are still not substantive there would seem to be little hope for speedy improvements in this upsetting situation. Even if some academic criminologists, criminal justice practitioners and policy-makers would go as far as to grant that victim rights exist at all, most of them would not accept that they should be endorse or sanctioned at the expense of offenders, and surely not at that of the system (Karmen, 2001: 311–8).

In the ultimate analysis, all of this distasteful attitude may be the understandable result of criminal justice practictioners working within a system pulled together in order to prosecute, and thus a system built around a punitive and retributive paradigm that naturally gives a ‘worse deal’ to victims in relation to the accused.

Even if victims’ rights are not fully acknowledged, at least their needs definitely are. However, it must be said that the argument to take the needs of crime victims into account represents a minimalist perspective in contrast to the maximalist argument for victims’ rights. Arguably (Walklate, 2000: 183) both positions confer a ‘special status’ on crime victims, even if this ‘special status’ is quite unlikely to usefully inform either policy or research, or even give them a ‘better deal’ in the justice process. This is perhaps because in all probability the support services offered to crime victims address their needs in spite of their rights, thereby endorsing and reinforcing the very criminal justice system that gives such a ‘bad deal’ to crime victims in relation to their offenders. If truth be told, however, some victim support agencies in Europe, while offering support and information services to victims, do militate in favour of victims’ rights (Victim Support Europe; formerly the European Forum for Victim Services, 2004), but this edge to their commitment is not a pronounced one, and surely not superior to their one-to-one assistance given to victims.

Such support services are not without their political facet. The UK’s Victim Support, for instance, can be justly seen as the ‘soft face’ of the conservative governments’ tough, ‘law and order’ approach. In Malta it is the same with Victim Support’s counterpart there, locally called Victim Support Malta (www.mddmalta.org, 2004). In their own subtle way these show the state’s intent to remain impartial by taking care not to be seen to be discriminating in favour of the victim. This is not in the least an inconsequential matter. For very often victims and offenders are considered to be in opposition to one another (Mid-Dlam ghad-Dawl, 2001: 12–3), and any action in favour of one part is taken to be against the other (Montebello, 2003: 20–8).

Most support services are offered to victims without recognising their actual right to them. The services are apparently thus provided ‘ex abundantia cordis’ (from the abundance of the heart), so to say, but not as a question of justice. This may be particularly seen, for instance, from the concepts underlying the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme. The scheme does not recognise that victims have a right to receive compensation but operates on the basis that the state should recognise public sympathy for victims. Furthermore, the state rejects any explicit responsibility for the plight of the victim, and neither does the scheme operate on the presumption that there are ‘innocent victims’ and victims who can be considered culpable, at least to some degree, for the offence. Another example, perhaps more critical, may arguably be the way Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programmes (VORP) are frequently viewed by victims and especially by offenders and their advocates. The declared aim of such programmes (Karmen, 1996, quoted in Siegel, 1998: 92) is to engage victims and offenders in direct negotiations that may lead to restitution agreements and possibly reconciliation between the two parties involved. However, victims and the offender’s side commonly see the whole exercise as a convenient way with which the offender dodges punitive correctional measures. This is particularly so in the UK (James and Raine, 1998: 111), where ‘restorative justice’ is not especially embraced (Sarah Buckmaster, Victim Support, Restorative Justice & Mediation, 2004: pers. comm.). It is thus no wonder that victims’ participation in such programmes is low (Newburn, 2002: 568).

All in all, the wide range of support services, including those offered by the system — such as Court Compensation Orders, the witness service (Zedner, 2002: 440), and the Domestic Violence Court (Simon, 2003: 453-4) — really contribute little to improving victims’ ‘deal’ by the justice process. The main reason being that they confirm, rather than challenge or refute, the retributive paradigm that is such a drawback to crime victims.

This paradigm continues to treat victims of crime as mere pawns in a justice process that is almost solely interested in prevention, prosecution and sentencing. To all intents and purposes the notional ‘victim’ of a crime is society. Furthermore, the fact that the accused is assumed to be innocent until proved guilty places the accused in a relatively privileged position in comparison to the victim. The victim is assumed to be in the wrong until proved right (Hagan, 1985: 252; Henderson, 2003: 506). Moreover, the hardships endured by victims beyond their original victimisation includes the trauma of testifying, uncertainty about their role in the justice process, lost time at work, trial delays, fear of retaliation by the defendant, and a general lack of knowledge of what is expected of them as the wheels of justice grind forward (Schmalleger, 1996: 294–5). It also includes the unsympathetic treatment and insensitive questioning by police, especially in rape cases, the exasperating delays in the criminal justice process, and the insignificant role victims have in the justice process other than providing evidence. All things considered, the general impression is that the needs of the victim are secondary to those of the criminal justice process in the proceedings of a trial. All of this points to the sad fact that crime victims had been transformed into a group of citizens burdened by a justice system that originally had been designed for their protection (Siegel, 1998: 90). The resulting hardships that most victims have to endure are hard-hitting and innumerable. What had been intended to give crime victims a ‘good deal’ sourly turned out to be a distressing rip-off.

And there’s more to it. Victimologist Andrew Karmen believes (2001: 186) that ‘in the distant past just about all victims were mistreated by agencies and officials within the criminal justice process. In the recent past some victims were treated much better than others’. In other words, a problem of differential handling exists resulting in the fact that the more vulnerable and relatively powerless groups in society seem to bear the brunt of crime in wider society as well as ‘secondary victimisation’ within the criminal justice process itself. This is adding insult to injury.

We have seen that, according to criminal justice research, the accused, rather than victims, indeed seem to get a “better deal” from the justice process. The socio-political matrix within which interest in victims and their rights grew was primarily directed not towards the improvement of victims’ lot but rather towards the better regulation of sentencing practices. Further, the quantification of victimisation and of the real impact of crime had crime prevention as its main aim, and not the enhancement of the justice process for victims. Next, the rights of victims are still not extensively endorsed or sanctioned by the criminal justice system. Additionally, the support agencies that offer services to victims do not sufficiently challenge or denounce the justice system that is inherently injurious to victims. Finally, unto this day victims suffer from unfair treatment within the system through much ‘secondary victimisation’.

By and large, the ‘bad deal’ that victims get within the justice process is almost certainly the palpable result of the punitive and retributive paradigm around which that process is organised, a process almost exclusively concerned with prevention, prosecution and sentencing regardless of victims’ plight.

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