Oxford Socio-Legal Studies
2 total works
This work is a detailed empirical study of the evolution of the Canadian Solicitor General's Justice for Victims of Crime initiative, an ethnographic study of policy-making in a justice ministry. The book traces the beginnings of the initative in the American victims' movement and academic victimology; it discusses the evangelical work of senior civil servants who introduced ideas about victims into the Ministry; and it proceeds to discuss the way in which those ideas took form in the context of debates about capital punishment, the reform of policing, and violence against women. Although the book focuses on the complexity of policies for victims, it is also concerned with the more general problems of the policy-making process in a federal government.
This book is an examination of the evolution of Government policies toward victims of crime in the United Kingdom, and follows the author's "View from the Shadows", which looked at official responses to the victims' movement in Canada. It attempts a fourfold task: to show how central institutions fostered what the Home Office came to regard as significant policies for victims of crime in England and Wales; to use those examples of policy-making to scout the topography of the criminal justice system; to make comparisons between that system and its Canadian counterpart; and, above all, to give the origins and early history of the National Association of Victims Support Schemes (NAVSS, later Victim Support). The importance of the book lies partly in the author's use of hitherto secret Home Office documents which throw new light not only upon the victim's movement but also government policy-making generally.