Tag Archives: victim

Moral panic in an age of anxiety

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Professor Viviene Cree, Dr Gary Clapton and Dr Mark Smith, social workers and social work academics at Edinburgh University, have written a persuasive academic article on moral panic and Operation Yewtree. It is worth reading in full. It would be difficult to improve on the cogency of their argument, so we simply present excerpts here in the hope that you will go and read it for yourself. (Emphases and edits are ours.)

“We live in a world that is said to be full of risk, danger and threat. Every day, a new social issue emerges to assail our sensibilities, often accompanied by the cry: What’s to be done? Who’s to blame?…

…On each occasion, there is an assumption that things are getting worse: that our society, communities and very lives are becoming more risky and more dangerous… claims of historical sexual and physical abuse have [recently] taken centre-stage.

This article explores the moral panic focused on the (now dead) media celebrity, Jimmy Savile…

In his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics [1], Stan Cohen… observed the following process in action:

  • A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.
  • Its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media.
  • The moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions.
  • Ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to.
  • The condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible.

…Moral panics are not, he claimed, total fabrications; there is always something at the heart of a panic that is real and concerning. This does not, however, mean that there are no fabrications within a moral panic…

…In their 1994 analysis, Goode and Ben Yehuda [2] asserted that moral panics are always disproportionate, and evidence may be fabricated in support of any cause celebre…

…it is important to highlight that the Yewtree report, Giving Victims a Voice, is full of scare-mongering, exaggeration and elision, as allegations are presented as ‘facts’ and accusations become ‘offences’, held to be incontrovertibly true…

…Moral aspects are also to the fore. Through the telling and retelling of the Savile story, we are reminded that children are innocents who must be protected from the adult world of sex; that women are passive, sexually submissive creatures who are also in need of protection; and that men are predatory, powerful and not to be trusted…

…This is not to excuse sexual abuse or to minimise the harm it may cause. Nor is it to suggest that there is no need for society to protect the vulnerable or champion those with few resources, economic, social and cultural. Rather it is to argue that scares such as the one surrounding Jimmy Savile are essentially conservative: they uphold a particular (overwhelmingly negative) view of human nature and they have the effect, both intended and unintended, of increasing fear and anxiety…

…Moral panics also draw attention away from the social and structural dimensions of problems in society; it can be no accident that the Jimmy Savile affair emerged at a time of acute social anxiety, with high levels of concern being expressed about public trust, and in particular, about the behaviour of politicians, bankers and the press. By focusing on Savile, what [are] we not looking at?…

…Moral panics encourage practice that is risk-averse and that anticipates the worst in others, especially men…”

Some brief comments only.

It is likely that the effect the writers mention of increasing public fear and anxiety are both intentional and unintentional. Politicians and media editors spot an incoming wave of public moral panic and ride it, shouting as they crest it just how big and dangerous the wave is. Red tops get sold by this means. Worse, politicians get to inculcate a sense of growing public dis-ease which they can then harness more globally. A nexus of repressive measures is built up and worked upon: the pressing need for surveillance of the public by CCTV and GCHQ, and the wholly disproportionate threat of prosecution for late-teenage sexting are obvious examples.

There is a vicious spiral going on.

At a time of relative austerity and general uncertainty, people get anxious about ‘the way the world is going’. They – we – find a bandwagon to climb on. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as outrage can be expressed. Because to express outrage puts the blame on others and discharges the negative emotions which have built up.

Politicians spot this trend and decide to respond to it, pumping it up as they go along. After all, they can use it for other purposes of control too.

And then it either dissipates or it doesn’t. Either way, there will be another bandwagon rolling past soon.

Meanwhile, people, sometimes innocent people, get hurt as they fall under the wheels.

 

  1. Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics. The Creation of Modes and Rockers, London: MacGibbon & Kee  ↩
  2. Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panics. The Social Construction of Deviance, Oxford: Blackwell  ↩

Victim-centered justice? (part 2 of 2)

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[Go here for the first part of this extended post…]

Gittos claims that, as it turned out, this new approach helped pave the way…

for a justice system which has spent 16 years completely reorientating itself away from objectivity and dispassionate assessment of evidence and towards elevating the rights of the victim at the expense of due process.

It’’s a good point. Nowadays a complainant can give evidence from behind a screen or by video link. His or her witness statement will have been taped, and it will often form the bulk of that person’s evidence at any trial. Meanwhile, the defendant sits in a dock, most often behind a thick glass screen, wearing headphones so that s/he can hear. S/he is semi-detached from what’’s going on in court.

The complainant will often be asked whether s/he needs a rest break, and will often be allowed to sit to give evidence. None of this solicitousness is likely be afforded to the defendant [1]. It could easily look (although this is surely not the intention) as if the whole process is ‘on the side’ of the complainant, and by implication ‘against’ the defendant.

In any event, as Gittos points out, the screen/ video link provision:

…removed an ancient legal principle – that a defendant should stand face to face with their accusers – in order to make the experience of engaging in the process easier for victims.

And then there was a further development, one which again appeared at the time to be beneficial.

[I]n 2007, Harriet Harman introduced the Victim Impact Statement. This allowed for victims to read prepared statements to the court, detailing how a crime had affected them emotionally, prior to the judge making a decision on sentence. Judges were quite open in stating that such statements could materially affect the sentence passed.

Gittos is arguably right to say:

[T]he sentencing process, which had been traditionally undertaken in the name of preventing further harm to society at large, became about repaying, through a deprivation of the defendant’’s liberty, the emotional harm done to the victim.

On the face of it, there is much that was positive about these initiatives. Who wouldn’’t want to make a demanding and difficult process easier for complainants? And why not involve them more in sentencing outcome? But the point is this.

Add together the provisions designed to support complainants and facilitate the difficult process of making a complaint and giving evidence. That is: taped complaint interview(s); the screen or video link; judicially expressed concern for the complainant’’s comfort and wellbeing; and court orders conferring lifelong anonymity on complainants, while the defendant’’s identity and personal story is often explored in excruciating detail for all to hear [2]. Compounded together, with others, these provisions can have an effect on the dynamic of any trial.

They can and often do detract from balance and objectivity.

They tend to confer an aura of dignity and truth-telling on a complainant. (S/he may or may not be telling the truth, but that’’s not the point.)

They tend to elicit sympathy, whereas this process should be about fact, not emotionality. It’’s a real trial, with real outcomes, not Boston Legal.

Taken together, they can easily communicate a sort of diffuse impression on a jury that the defendant is more likely to be guilty. S/he may be, of course, although, equally, she may not. But that determination, as to guilt or innocence, must only be about the quality of hard evidence, not about sympathy or about how courts and trials are set up to run.

As, again, Gittos puts it:

These reforms represented a clear move away from a criminal-justice system that prioritised objectivity to one which prioritised the stories and feelings of the victim. The victim went from being the invisible ‘third party’ in disputes between the state and the citizen to being the central focus.

Criminal trials, and especially those for extremely serious offences, are meant to be about an analysis and a determination. Analysis of the evidence. Determination of the truth: innocent or guilty. Anything that gets in the way of these ends brings about unfairness and damage, not only to human lives but also to the system of justice. Arguably, a strongly victim-centered criminal justice system is, in the end, damaging to justice, to fairness, and to the rule of law.


  1. who (and it needs to be said really quite often) is adjudged at this stage in this prosecution process to be as innocent as the complainant.  ↩
  2. This theme will be the subject of later posts.  ↩


Victim-centered justice? (part 1 of 2)

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Here’’s how the prosecution system worked in England and Wales until at least 1994. (This applied to sexual offence cases and also to other kinds of offence based on a complaint.)

After a complaint a police inquiry would be initiated. The complainant was an important part of that process, but the police and CPS would be agnostic, for the moment, about whether s/he was reliable or telling the truth. After all, there could be any number of reasons for a complaint, some of them positive, others less so; and recall of events exists on a sliding scale of accuracy [1]. Of course, the whole point of the police inquiry was to test whether the complaint had any basis in fact and was evidence of a crime committed.

The police would follow up any number of relevant leads, and not just those supporting a prosecution. The aim was, in part, to assess the veracity and reliability of the evidence as the inquiry developed.

At a suitable juncture, a file would be sent to the CPS, and an assessment would be made on various criteria. On the evidence gathered, was a conviction more likely than not? Was it in the public interest to proceed to trial? At this point, instructions could be given to the police to make further inquiries to gather more evidence or to finesse that which they had already collected.

The key point here is this. The police and the CPS would together be acting independently. They were not agents of the complainant. They did not represent him or her in any way. Any trial would, importantly, be R [2] v John or Jane Doe, not Complainant A v John or Jane Doe. The complainant was a witness: a vital one, but nothing more. His or her evidence was to be evaluated like the evidence of any witness, for veracity and reliability.

Yes, this system could come over as a little aloof. Mostly because care would have been taken to treat the complainant as a witness and his or her evidence as just that: evidence, like any other. The task of police and CPS was to keep at arm’s length from the complainant and not to get sucked in to any agenda being worked out by him or her.

And then it all changed……

Luke Gittos sets out usefully what then happened.

In 1999, the New Labour government decided that [the] focus on objectivity and impartial judgement failed to do justice to the victims of crime. Jack Straw… said [3]: ‘”For too long, victims of crime have not been given a proper support and protection they deserve. This must change. I am determined to ensure that their needs are placed at the very heart of the criminal-justice system” [4].’….. The Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 allowed evidence from vulnerable witnesses to be given behind a screen or via a video link…. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 then extended these protection to all witnesses, whether considered vulnerable or not, as long as certain statutory criteria were met……

The intentions were no doubt commendable. There is every reason why complainants should be treated kindly and respectfully and their allegations should be taken seriously. The exercise of sensitivity towards a complainant is right and proper in itself. Apart from anything else, such care also helps ensure that complainants feel able to come forward in the first place.

But this should never be – and should never have been – at the expense of objectivity and impartiality……

[continued in the next post]


  1. As a hedge against this, the personal consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions used to be required for a wide range of sexual offence prosecutions. (Consent is still needed in a much narrower range of abuse cases.) Until 1994, corroboration (namely, some form of independent evidence confirming an element of the complainant’’s testimony) was also required by common law in certain cases.  ↩
  2. ‘‘R’’ = ‘’Regina’’, ‘”the Crown’’.  ↩
  3. ‘Partners Against Crime’, Victim Support Magazine, Summer 71, p 8. ↩
  4. There is an obvious problem with what Straw said here. He appears to assume that the complainant is axiomatically believable and reliable as a witness. But this is the very thing that any well-founded trial system is meant to determine – on the basis or evidence and nothing else. Should a complainant’s “needs” be placed “at the very heart of the criminal-justice system”? Not at the expense of a fair determination of guilt or innocence.  ↩