Since the 1980s, victims of crime have moved up the political, legal, policy and practice agendas. Concomitantly, there has been an associated change in the meaning and significance of ‘victimhood’. This special section of the International Review of Victimology explores the relationship between the increased salience of victim rights (or entitlements) and victim values (or status), and vice versa. Of particular interest is the intersection of different victim values and how they shape our understanding and response to the victims of crime and injustice. Central to this special section are the overarching themes of ‘victim values’ and ‘victim rights’ and how these two themes are interrelated. It is undeniable that the victims’ movement and victimology have made significant advances in the status afforded to victims and their treatment within the criminal justice system. The last 50 years has taken victims from the hinterland into the heartland of our thinking and practice of justice. This special section will prompt an important and timely discussion of a new phase of criminal justice, in which we are witnessing the ascendancy of the victim as the new cultural icon of crime and injustice, which brings with it a challenge to the orthodoxy of traditional criminal law’s approach to procedural justice. How is this affecting our conception of justice and due process? To what extent is access to victim rights shaped by the product of political or systemic bias?
Experiences of victimization highlight the importance of storytelling as much as they obstruct it. Although victimology tends to focus on clearly severe and/or conventional forms of harm, this article turns to experiences that are both common and contested. Specifically, we examine how people recount and evaluate experiences of microaggressions: subtle, everyday forms of exclusion, insult, or discrimination directed at marginalized groups. To examine how people make sense of such experiences, we recorded 17 peer conversations about microaggressions and conducted follow-up interviews with the 34 participants. Using narrative analysis, we examined how and with what effects storytellers communicated their experiences of microaggression to their co-participants. Our findings demonstrate that participants used various narrative strategies to convey the feeling of being targeted, frame microaggressions as morally transgressive, and exert mastery over past experiences. Conversational partners played a key role in co-constructing evaluation and affirming moral meaning. The findings highlight the value of storytelling for articulating experiences that are hurtful yet ambiguous, suggesting ways to foster recognition and mutual understanding across social differences.
Image-based abuse and sextortion are increasingly recognised as serious forms of technology-facilitated sexual violence, yet limited empirical research has examined how victim-survivors navigate justice-seeking in high-stigma contexts. This article examines victim-survivors’ justice journeys in cases of image-based abuse and sextortion in Bangladesh, focusing on silence and disclosure, institutional responses, and evolving understandings of justice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 18 victim-survivors and 12 stakeholders, the study adopts a victim-centred analytical approach informed by secondary victimisation, procedural justice, and access to justice frameworks. The findings show that silence and delayed disclosure often functioned as deliberate and protective strategies shaped by stigma, reputational risk, and concerns about loss of control over personal information. For those who engaged with formal or semi-formal systems, fragmented reporting pathways, repeated disclosure demands, evidentiary burdens, and limited communication frequently contributed to secondary harm and disengagement. Attrition emerged as a cumulative and reasoned response to emotional exhaustion and procedural burden rather than indifference or failure. Many victim-survivors ultimately redefined justice in experiential terms, prioritising safety and restoration of control over formal legal outcomes. The study demonstrates that legal reform alone is insufficient to ensure meaningful access to justice for victim-survivors of technology-facilitated abuse.
Children exploited in criminality occupy a precarious legal position: their victimisation is rendered invisible by the conduct through which they are exploited. Drawing on the ideal victim framework and double deviance hypothesis, this article examines why children coerced into criminal activity are encountered by authorities as offenders rather than victims, and why boys (who constitute the majority of children identified in criminal networks in Sweden) are simultaneously the most exploited and the least protected as they are rendered invisible as victims while remaining visible as offenders. Through a systematic genealogical analysis of international anti-trafficking instruments, the article traces the tension between offenderisation and victimisation in Sweden’s regulatory approach to child criminal exploitation. The analysis reveals a persistent gap between European legal obligations and Swedish domestic implementation. While the European Union Anti-Trafficking Directive explicitly recognises criminal exploitation as a trafficking purpose and mandates non-punishment for victims, Swedish legislation neither incorporates criminal exploitation as a trafficking purpose nor provides a non-punishment provision.
