Introduction

Victimhood is a contested space. Far from being a fixed category, ‘the “victim” label is contingent and complex, shifting frequently according to social practices, race, gender, and class relations’ (Spalek, 2006: 31). Not all persons who experience harm and trauma associated with criminal acts will see themselves as victims or be afforded victim status. Similar to crime, victims can ‘be seen as social categories’ (Sanders, 2002: 206, emphasis in original), which are contingent upon economic and political processes (Green, 2007: 91). Nor should being a ‘victim’ be understood as a neutral process (Walklate, 2007: 52) and there is both desirability and resistance to the embracing of the term and the connotations that derive from it (Spalek, 2006: 10–11).

Nils Christie (1986) recognised the complexity surrounding the social processes involved in ascribing individual victim status when he wrote his seminal piece entitled ‘The ideal victim’. This provided a detailed examination of the processes surrounding victims and their ability to claim legitimate victim status. It identified the factors that influence the acceptance or otherwise of the victimhood of a person who has experienced crime. Christie put forward his concept of an ‘ideal victim’, involving five characteristics whose presence, he argued, was more likely to readily identify a person as a genuine victim, worthy and deserving of ‘victim’ status, and with the ability to use the status to trigger a variety of services and outcomes. The five characteristics can be briefly summarised as follows: a focus on the weakness and vulnerability of the victim; the respectability of the victim's actions at the time; the location of the victim at the time of the incident; the ‘big and bad’ nature of the offender; and the non-existence of a prior relationship between the victim and offender (Christie, 1986: 19). In contrast to this, Christie argues that an absence of these characteristics will usually mark a person as ineligible for victim status, or viewed as ‘non-ideal victims’.

The concept of the ideal victim is an enduring framework that is arguably still of relevance and importance in contemporary society. This chapter takes the concept of the ideal victim and applies it to a specific category: online fraud victims or those who are defrauded in a virtual environment.