Читать книгу Approaching Victimology as social science for Human rights a Spanish perspective - Gema Varona Martínez - Страница 5

Introduction

1. DESCRIPTION AND CONTEXTUALISATION

Victimology is an empirical and interdisciplinary social science studying victimisation and recovery processes understood as complex dynamics. The complexity affects the diversity of those experiences throughout time. There are multiple, visible and hidden factors and contexts affecting those processes. Victimology is a young discipline, usually conceived of within Criminology, although some of its concepts can be applied to other traumatic events or harms beyond crime.

This book on Victimology contributes to the objectives of expanding victimological knowledge by helping to understand, apply, analyse and evaluate victimological and further social data from the standpoint of interdependent human rights, particularly when those rights have been violated. The final purpose of Victimology is to prevent, minimise and repair the impact of victimisation, including secondary victimisation. With that aim, this book tries to clarify some concepts as keys for further learning. To focus on basic victimological concepts requires the simplification of entangled individual experiences and social phenomena, while fostering a critical standpoint in order to facilitate more depth and autonomy for future knowledge.

In the European Union document by Milquet (2019, 14), titled “Strengthening victims’ rights: from compensation to reparation. For a new EU Victims’ rights strategy 2020-2025”, the point of departure is a “human rights-based concept of victimisation inspired by different contributions of the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA)”. In this book, we underline a conceptualisation of victims in a non-essentialist, pathological or antagonistic perspective. Victims do not have the right to punish the offender, but they do have a right to access to justice. Whether justice should be defined in punitive terms or more restorative ones is something that communities should decide under criteria of ethics and evidence, this last one usually quite fragmentary and complex in these issues. In that sense, victims have rights and the state positive obligations towards them. Thus, the state is a duty-bearer1 towards victims as rights-holders, but those rights, in a true human rights perspective, should be thought of as indivisible and interdependent with other people’s rights, including offenders’, under a critical standpoint of social justice.

The methodology used in this book will allow for the identification of relevant information on Victimology in different areas and at diverse scales, and hopefully, transform that reflection into tools to be applied in the thinking about concrete future study cases where the readers will have to organise quantitative and qualitative data and arrange it systematically in order to get to debatable conclusions. Hence, this book will map some general topics of interest in Victimology and it will underline the gaps between victim law and its practice, particularly within the framework of Spain.

Readers are also invited to apply victimological knowledge to evaluate different options in identifying and understanding victimisation and responding to different victims, finding the resources to do that and defending their positions and proposals informed by the above-mentioned ethics and limited evidence. Perhaps these pages can contribute to a broad dynamic of ongoing and autonomous learning. Among the specific competencies of the discipline of Victimology, we can highlight the integration of interdisciplinary critical knowledge by employing social science methodologies (including the use of recent technologies) which are particularly relevant in evaluating victim policies. That interdisciplinarity will also be present in the following seventeen chapters.

To recap, we propose to work together on certain aspects of the kaleidoscope of victimisation and de-victimisation, in a sort of Victimology of conversation:

1) To grasp the complexity and need for further studies and research.

2) To understand the contribution of Victimology within social sciences, from a perspective of inter-professional and transversal education, considering intersectionality issues (gender, age, ethnicity, disabilities issues, etc.) (Long, 2021).

3) To understand some elements of the different experiences of victimisation, the problems related to hidden victimisation, the theories that try to explain them and the standards of victimisation prevention and treatment.

4) To be able to critically identify problems and tentative responses of social and professional interests by using victimological concepts and knowledge.

5) To relate, in an interdisciplinary way, the basic set of concepts on different kinds of victimisation and recovery.

6) To find and use adequate literature references as guides for deeper studies.

7) To set out hypotheses about future research and be able to contrast them with critical analysis and empirical data.

8) To understand the diversity (and injustices) of some victimisation and recovery processes and their social and legal meaning through the study of the implementation of some legislation in force and its limitations.

9) To elaborate documents and presentations in this field.

2. METHODOLOGY

When we mention the perspective of Spain in the subtitle of the book, we refer mainly to the public policies and the legal framework of Spain, but also to the legal cultural and social aspects of this country, even as they are ever more influenced by the dominant Anglo-Saxon victimological literature, together with the United Nations and the European Union policies.

As mentioned before, the thread that runs through the entire book is the thinking about victimisation and recovery: their meanings for the different stakeholders and their diverse modalities. Throughout the chapters, we try to approach key terms to understand the critical issues with regard to the concepts of victims, victimhood, victimisation risk, impact, reparation and recovery, in different crimes and for diverse populations. Thus, we finally arrive at the concept of restorative justice to argue whether it is possible to construct a more inclusive justice system for victims, while the inertias of the classic criminal justice system seem to overlook the rights and demands of multiple people who have experienced victimisation. Ultimately, victimisation processes can only be understood in relation to power and broader social control processes.

The chapters have an identical structure: an introduction, a list of key concepts, readings with questions for debate, practical exercises and basic references, selecting those mainly in open access2. This learning proposal tries to promote the integration of knowledge where the reader is the main actor. Beyond a mere transfer of data, we offer basic concepts as keys or guide to enter into the complexities of Victimology so as to critically open perspectives. Cooperative and active methodologies will be employed by inviting to work on concrete projects and with an action focus orientation. We propose some strategies to learn to look, to see, to observe, to think and to talk about victim experiences and legislation. More readings will be suggested in the final references section of each chapter to open an internal and external dialogue of ideas on the controversial topics of Victimology.

Ethical considerations are also important in this book. Some of its readers might have suffered diverse victimisations and this book bases itself on experiences where victims are actors (experts in their own experiences) and not just an object for study. Promoting active listening and critical understanding, as well as providing support information, are central aspects of the book.

3. REFERENCES

European Commission (2020a). Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. EU strategy on victims’ rights (2020–2025). COM(2020) 258 final. Brussels, 24.6.2020, accessible at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52020DC0258&from=EN.

European Commission (2020b). Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the implementation of Directive 2012/29/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime, and replacing Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA. COM(2020) 188 final. Brussels, 11.5.2020.

Long, L. J. (2021). The ideal victim: A critical race theory (CRT) approach, International Review of Victimology, 10.1177/0269758021993339.

Milquet, J. (2019) Strengthening victims’ rights: from compensation to reparation. For a new EU Victims’ rights strategy 2020-2025. Council document 8629/19 of 2019-04-16. Report of the Special Adviser, J. Milquet, to the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. Luxembourg: Publication Office of the European Union.

Phare Horizontal Programme on Justice and Home Affairs. (2002). Reinforcement of the Rule of Law: Final Report on the First Part of the Project. Brussels: European Commission.

1.On the positive obligation of the state and professionals to be victimologically trained, see Article 25 of the 2012 EU Directive and Articles 30 and 31 of the Spanish 4/2015 Statute Act on Victim’s Rights.

2.All references can be found in the references section of the different chapters. The complete reference will be given in the chapter for which is mainly used, even if the reference can also be found in other chapters when first quoted.