Imagining the Victim of Crime.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 April 2008
• Author: Antonopoulos, Georgios A.

Imagining the Victim of Crime S. Walklate (2007) Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, pp. 189, ISBN-10:0335 21727 3

According to the Left Realist tradition in criminology, there are four points/elements that make up the square of crime': (a) the offender, (b) the victim, (c) the state and state agencies, and (d) informal methods of social control. Crime can be understood only in terms of the interrelationship between these elements. The 'square of crime' seems a quite balanced figure/image. If one tried to provide a graphic representation depending on the research or the attention on each of the aforementioned points, this image's balance would probably be lost. One of the reasons is that research on victims has been by far smaller than for offenders or the state agencies dealing with crime and offenders. Sandra Walklate, currently the Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, is certainly one of the academics who has offered much in the study of crime victims and whose work has helped to correct the imbalance of offender/victim/state/social control research. Imagining the Victim of Crime is yet another contribution in this vein.

In chapter 1, which is largely historical, Walklate traces the position of the crime victim in the whole criminal justice process from a marginal to a central one. In this historical process there have been some key moments, which have been indicative of the general socioeconomic, political and cultural context in which these moments took place. This chapter offers more than just a historical framework of how the victim of crime has been perceived and...