Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S., by Carrie A. Rentschler, and: Canadian Victims of Crime: Critical Insights by J. Scott Kenney (review)

In light of the Conservative government’s law-and-order approach, which assumes that victims ineluctably want their perpetrators to be harshly punished, Second Wounds and Canadian Victims of Crime reveal the complexities of the impact of crime on victims’ lives and the variability of victims’ responses. Carrie Rentschler and J. Scott Kenney offer insightful analyses of the experiences of victims and victims’ rights movements in the United States and Canada. While a considerable amount of criticism of victims’ rights discourse has been produced, both books show why it remains important to study the category of the victim as a form of political and activist subjectivity.

Second Wounds is split into two sections. The first traces the genealogy of victims’ rights discourses through the victims’ rights movement in the United States. In the first chapter, Rentschler analyzes the dominant law-and-order orientation of victims’ rights activism and how this particular discourse developed and shaped the language of the activism. The second chapter examines how the relationship between the victims’ rights movement’s hegemonic law-and-order framework and its other political genealogies has been scripted into activist training texts. In the second section of the book, Rentschler engages with the victims’ rights movement’s mainstream media strategies, its appropriation by news and entertainment media, and activists’ reappropriation of those tactics. She reveals how national organizations made victims’ rights discourses available to their own advocates and to media organizations.

In chapter three of Second Wounds Rentschler discusses how victim organizations perceive news media and talk shows as victimizing agents, but also as agents of healing that enable victims to testify to their experiences of victimization before a large listening public. The fourth chapter examines how the media-oriented training of victim advocates mobilized some American journalism schools to develop victim-centered curricular materials. Chapter five analyzes a news genre engendered by journalists’ trauma training that commemorates the lives of people killed in major acts of mass victimization. In the sixth chapter, Rentschler reveals the life-and-death struggles that take place through victims’ rights discourse of profiling victims’ and convicted killers’ lives. Here, Rentschler focuses on the advertising campaigns launched by the clothing company Benetton and the nonprofit organization Parents of Murdered Children, which struggle to portray the humanity of death row inmates and murder victims, respectively.

Rentschler’s Second Wounds relies on feminist and poststructural thought to analyze the manifold forms of victims’ rights discourse in the United States. Guided by Foucault, she argues that victims’ rights discourse constitutes what is “sayable” about crime and criminal justice and by whom. It makes some victims and secondary victims visible in the media and obscures others whose “skin color, sexual orientation or class status, appear less innocent in the moral economies of crime” (p. 13). Furthermore, Rentschler carefully documents how this discourse emerged in the United States through a “get tough on crime” perspective. She also points out that victims’ rights advocacy is a contested terrain waged by a number of actors; it is not reducible to those advocating a law-and-order agenda. She shows, for example, the alternative discourses centered on anti-death penalty advocacy. In addition, she contends that victims’ rights discourse both invented and revised the feminist concept of secondary victimization centered on the family as crime victim.

Rentschler’s work on victims’ rights discourse is informed by several sets of textual materials including victims’ movement publications, media planning texts, and policy reports. Rentschler relies on training texts from the National Center for Victims of Crime and the National Organization for Victim Assistance. Beyond analyzing these training texts, she conducted interviews with communication staffand directors at these organizations. Using these materials, Rentschler approaches the victims’ rights movement as “middle range” or activists’ labor, shifting analysis away from...