Constructing Victims’ Rights: The Home Office, New Labour, and Victims

Source: (2004) New York: Oxford University Press.

This book by Paul Rock provides a detailed account of the world of criminal justice policy-making, of changing sensibilities and perspectives on criminal justice, and of people (government officials, politicians, non-governmental organizations, and practitioners’ representatives) collaborating in the field of victims’ interests. He shows how various critical events and public discourse, along with the actions of the New Labour government in England, came together in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the form of a Victims’ Bill of Rights, which later became the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill in 2003. This transformed the politics and formal identities of victims in England and Wales. Rock covers all of this in the following chapters: crime and victims at the turn of the century (late 1990s); the Home Office at the turn of the century; the organization and work of various government officials and committees with respect to victims; the victim as consumer; the victim and human rights; the victim and compensation and reparation; the vulnerable or intimated victim; the victim and race; and the consummation of a considerable variety of movements, actions, and changes in attitudes – both within government and in society – in the direction of certain policies and laws regarding victims’ needs and rights in the criminal justice system and society as a whole.