Judging Victims: Why We Stigmatize Survivors and How They Reclaim Respect (review)

One of the most contentious issues surrounding crime victimization stems from the concept of shared responsibility, or the belief that some victims precipitate or facilitate their own crimes. Assumptions that victims do or fail to do something that contributes to crime can negatively affect how victims are labeled, treated and even how they see themselves. In Judging Victims: Why We Stigmatize Survivors and How They Reclaim Respect, Jennifer Dunn investigates "vocabularies of victimization," the culturally-imbued stories about victims that elicit such judgments and evoke corresponding emotional responses that range from compassion, pity and sometimes contempt for helpless victims, to respect or admiration for heroic survivors. Dunn argues that a "cultural code of agency," based on the assumption that all individuals have free will and are therefore always accountable for their actions, is central to how victims will be judged. Her analysis, informed by several sociological frameworks, including social constructionism, social movement theory, sociology of emotions and identity work, is a fresh approach to understanding and problematizing notions of shared responsibility.

Dunn organizes her book around four ideal victim types - blameworthy, blameless, pathetic or admirable - and links each victim type to a gender-based crime (e.g., rape, domestic violence, incest/sexual abuse). In chapters devoted to separate victim/crime-type pairings, she examines the formula stories disseminated by social movement activists (i.e., claims makers) in an effort to evoke empathy and compassion for victims of these crimes. More specifically, the chapters describe a progression of sorts, beginning with the efforts of anti-rape and battered women's advocates to deflect responsibility away from victims by emphasizing victims' powerlessness against social forces that restrict mobility and choice, to the backlash or countermovement that criticized these images as infantalizing women as pathologically helpless and pathetic victims. It concludes with the new "survivor" vocabularies, especially prominent during the clergy abuse scandals of the 1990s (195), that reframe victims from pitiful to admirable by showcasing how these victim-survivors exert agency and take back control of their lives.

Despite Dunn's stated objective to demonstrate that social movements have historical precedents and a cumulative effect (49), the organization of the chapters gives the false impression that there is a linear progression of such images - from blameworthy to blameless to pathetic to admirable - and that each social movement has pioneered some unique set of vocabularies distinct from each other. Even the chapter titles (e.g., The Antirape Movement and Blameworthy Victims, Survivors of Clergy Abuse and Admirable Victims) suggest an exclusivity of each victim type that is disingenuous to the multiplicity of vocabularies that exist for each crime.

Moreover, archetypal victim narratives are seldom all-inclusive. For example, stories used to promote many social causes throughout the decades, including almost all anti-drug campaigns, have tended to portray young white women as the sympathetic and innocent heroines, while marginalizing most others. Such differential standards, based not merely on what victims do but who they are, have made it more difficult for some victims to garner sympathy or even to obtain equal justice. Different standards can clearly be seen in the ways in which cultural codes of agency are applied to victimization. For example, younger victims are less likely to be held accountable, not just because of their physical vulnerability, but because they are seen as lacking agency. Within a society that disallows children the ability to consent, something we assume adults can always do (166), child victims will seldom be seen as complicit.

In addition to age, there are clear gender differences that affect how victims will be judged based on cultural codes. According to Dunn, agency itself is a masculine construct, whereas qualities we associate with victimization such as passivity and helplessness are coded as feminine (190). She suggests that ideas about agency place women in a double bind; they are blamed if they violate norms of femininity (i.e., exerting too much control), and they are...