Restorative Justice and the Law by Walgrave Lode;

Author:Walgrave, Lode; [Walgrave, Lode]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Willan Publishing
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Community has a right to be involved as victim

For many restorative justice commentators the community is a secondary victim of crime (Pranis 1998). As the community has been adversely affected, it has a right to be involved in how to deal with the crime. This understanding gives the community a ‘direct stake’ in the resolution of the dispute due to its need for redress and its responsibility for the resolution and prevention of crime (McCold 1996: 90–2). Thus, ‘community input’ may come through the voice of the extended victim, as representative of community as victim. This connects with discussions about the community as stakeholder. However, it is rarely clear what the nature of this ‘stake’ is and, consequently, where this conception of community ends. For some commentators this includes ‘everyone affected’. Indirectly, however this could be extended to include all members of the broader political community, namely the nation state. This merely returns us to the conventional understanding of the role of the public within the traditional criminal justice process. This malleable essence of victimhood – or ‘victimalization’ as Boutellier (this volume) suggests – has become a dominant narrative for contemporary criminal justice. As Garland notes: ‘In the high crime society, tiny crimes are viewed cumulatively and “the community” is the collective, all-purpose victim’ (2001: 181). The problem with the ‘community as victim’ is that it does not take us very far in clarifying the nature of community input or public participation and merely reinforces the notion of ‘victim’ as an elastic and all-pervasive cultural symbol.

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