One - The ideal victim through other(s’) eyes

Summary

Nils Christie's legendary article on the ideal victim is firmly placed within the victimological canon. Christie drew our attention to the mechanisms underlying the extent to which we grant individuals victim status. As Daly (2014: 378) summarised: ‘A victim status is not fixed, but socially constructed, mobilized and malleable’.

However, what factors influence this construction? Christie (1986) assumed that the most important reasons for perceiving a victim as legitimate and blameless are the specific character traits of the victim and of the relation between victim and offender. Substantiation on the reasons for this had no place in his brief chapter, but has only occurred in subsequent research and theorising. The first aim of this chapter is to expand on these two arguments using more contemporary theories that are important in (experimental and critical) victimology, namely, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) (Fiske et al, 2002) and the Moral Typecasting Theory (MTT) (Gray and Wegner, 2009). The SCM can expand our insights into Christie's criteria of weakness, blamelessness and femaleness, while the MTT can shed more light on the big and bad offender and the (non-)relationship between offender and victim. These two theories provide more insight into the role of stereotypes in the perception of the victim and the dynamics of the relation between victim and offender.

They not only further Christie's (1986: 18) argument that ‘being a victim is not a thing, an objective phenomenon’, but also, in combination with the second half of our chapter, emphasise the redundancy of absolute victim(isation) characteristics as a factor in societal or individual constructions of the victim status. Indeed, where the first half of our chapter provides retrospective theoretical support of Christie's views, the second half adopts a more critical stance. Again, we confront Christie's perspective with more recent bodies of (theoretical) literature that go beyond the specific character traits of the victim and the relation between victim and offender, this time by emphasising the role of the observers of the victim, both individually and collectively, in determining whether the victim is seen as legitimate and blameless. We do this, first, through an analysis of the ideal victim against the backdrop of the work on the justice motive (Lerner, 1980; Hafer and Bègue, 2005).