Carrie A. Rentschler's Second Wounds: Victims' Rights and the Media in the U.S. is a well-written and well-documented work of scholarship that draws on a range of novel data sources to analyze the discursive ways in which victims' rights groups of various stripes engage in political work. With the exception of one chapter examining curricular training materials for journalists, Rentschler's focus on the media is mostly secondary—as the means of shaping and facilitating the strategies that victims' rights advocates utilize to campaign for their causes. It's a book that covers a lot of territory skillfully, and it deserves close attention from scholars in a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, criminology, sociology, feminist studies, and media studies. The book unfolds in two sections with a total of six chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion. The first section contains two chapters providing a historical overview of the victims' rights movement from 1964 to the present and discussing the ways in which its discourses have come to be utilized. This includes the “ventriloquism” of crime victims (34) by law-and-order proponents and, in the second chapter, how the law-and-order movement has helped to shape both notions of legitimate victimhood and the scripts that activists use to describe victims. The second part of the book, which includes chapters 3 to 6, focuses on the “second wounds” in the title and the media strategies that national victims' rights organizations use to “reappropriate” the tactics often used against them. These second wounds result from “secondary victimization,” a notion used in two ways to describe some of the collateral consequences of crime victimization. It first signifies when a victim is revictimized by the processes of the criminal justice system and, second, signifies when the media's treatment of the victim is construed as perpetrating additional harm on the victim and his or her loved ones.
Chapter 3 focuses on the ways in which victim advocates talk and strategize about generating media coverage for their causes, and it does so innovatively, by analyzing the training materials used by victim advocates. These manuals illustrate through testimonials the “second wounds” inflicted by engaging with the media. Rentschler's lucid writing style captures it well, as in this passage: “When Shapiro and other victims describe the experience of seeing themselves on the news or recount their interactions with the news media as forms of secondary victimization, they describe an injurious chasm that forms between themselves as personal, physical, and emotional witnesses to their own suffering and the industrial production of their testimony for others who are unburdened by the ontological, affective, and epistemological dimension of being witness to suffering firsthand” (96). This and many other passages illustrate how clearly Rentschler writes, and she mostly remains free from the thickets of the heavy jargon and self-aggrandizing style that tend so often, to my eye, to characterize many media- and cultural-studies texts.
Chapter 4 considers the other side of the relationship between the victim advocate and the journalist by examining how journalists themselves are trained to represent victims in the news. Beginning in the 1990s, and pressured to change their training by victim advocates, “[j]ournalists are [now] asked to become not just scribes but active enablers of victim recovery” by learning to “speak in the language of traumatic stress” (129). Punitive outcomes in response to this kind of reporting are not guaranteed but are certainly enabled, in part because the new discourse “applies a concept of trauma to the news production process in order to tactically redefine journalism of crime and disaster as the journalism of collective victimization” (115).
The next two chapters explore examples of media representations of victims. Chapter 5 does this through the “genre of victim obituary” (138)—that is, the “profile of life” memorials for victims published by many news outlets, mostly of the Oklahoma City attacks and those of 9/11. Chapter 6 examines the highly controversial Benetton advertising campaign in 2000, featuring humanizing portraits of death-row inmates, and the countercampaign that the group Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) attempted to launch to remind viewers of the featured inmates' victims.
In short, the book examines the extensive range of ways in which victims are employed, enlisted, and even drafted to do the political and commercial work of activists, politicians, and journalists. As Rentschler writes, “While so much mass communication research tends to examine the work of media influence according the effects that can be measured within groups of people that consume media texts, this book offers a different way of thinking about the strategies that advocates and other cultural producers use to influence public debate through the infrastructural, strategic, and pedagogical dimensions of victim-based publicity” (218). This book, then, focuses less on the media themselves and more on victims' rights claims makers and how they have built a “communication infrastructure” and “set of conventions for telling stories” (218).
This reader would have been interested to encounter more examples of secondary victimization by the media and the perilous dance in which many victims and their families are often forced to engage when dealing with journalists. For instance, the fickle role the media played in the high-profile case of three-year-old Madeleine McCann's disappearance in Portugal might have been useful to consider. McCann's parents made heavy use of the tabloid press in both Portugal and the United Kingdom to raise the alarm about their missing daughter, only, in time, to have many in the press turn on them as their accusers. However, such examples of secondary victimization, particularly from abroad, lie beyond the scope of the American victims' rights discourse and activity that is the focus of Rentschler's thorough and compelling book.
