Introduction

It is now commonplace to discuss the contemporary condition of social life by reference to the risk society thesis and, of course, much has been made already of the differential impact of the risk society on contemporary life in relation to crime. Young (1999, 2003), for example, talks of the move from the inclusive to the exclusive society and the concomitant rise in vindictiveness and Garland (2001) tells us about the embeddedness of risk-associated ideas in relation to criminal justice policy through the vehicle of the ‘culture of control’. Both of these analyses (among others) take as given the importance of the crime victim, not just as a symbolic reference point for government policy, but also as a dominant one (Garland and Sparks, 2000). Moreover, in the context of the emergence of community safety in relation to crime prevention, the role of the victim, or more specifically, criminal victimisation, has come to occupy centre stage. Local authorities in England and Wales are required to conduct criminal victimisation surveys as a key element in informing their crime reduction strategy documents. Some limited initial optimism was expressed about the likely outcome of this community safety turn. For while Crawford (1998, pp 248-50) itemises the ways in which strategies of responsibilisation permeate the community safety approach to crime prevention (in which victimisation prevention [Karmen, 1990] is a key characteristic), he recognised that there remained the question of ‘security differentials’: put simply, who was likely to get access to what kind of protection? Nevertheless, the door was considered open for the problem of crime and its relationships with safety to be differently interpreted. In addition, Hughes and Edwards (2002) talk of the possibility such processes offered for what they called the ‘rehumanisation’ and ‘resocialisation’ of security and safety.

Arguably, however, as the community safety agenda has unfolded in the intervening period, analyses such as these do not delve deeply enough into the mechanisms underlying the processes associated with the rise of victimhood and its impact. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest such an analysis and to offer a critical understanding of the current imagining of the crime victim in the discourse of community safety.