The Library
The 'ideal' victim of international criminal law
Tools
Schwöbel, Christine (2018) The 'ideal' victim of international criminal law. European Journal of International Law, 29 (3). pp. 703-724. doi:10.1093/ejil/chy056 ISSN 1464-3596.
|
PDF
WRAP-ideal-victim-international-criminal-law-Schwobel-Patel-2018.pdf - Accepted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (811Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chy056
Abstract
The role of victims is increasingly central to discussions in and practices of international criminal law. Greater attention is, I argue, leading to a visual and discursive specification of victimhood. Drawing on criminologist Nils Christie’s theorizing of victimhood, and identifying practices inside and outside the international criminal law courtroom, I discuss the social, political, and legal construction of an ‘ideal’ victim. The features of an ‘ideal’ victim of international crime are identified as being: (a) weakness and vulnerability, (b) dependency and (c) grotesqueness. The features coalesce into a feminized, infantilized, and racialized stereotype of victimhood. I argue that this problematic construction of the ‘ideal' victim is to be contextualized within the ‘attention economy’. The ‘attention economy’ views attention as a finite and highly in-demand resource which rewards the extreme and spectacular at the expense of the moderate and considered.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Subjects: | K Law [Moys] > KC International Law | ||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | International criminal law, International criminal courts | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | European Journal of International Law | ||||||||
Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1464-3596 | ||||||||
Official Date: | August 2018 | ||||||||
Dates: |
|
||||||||
Volume: | 29 | ||||||||
Number: | 3 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 703-724 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1093/ejil/chy056 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in European Journal of International Law following peer review. The version of record Schwobel-Patel, Christine (2018) The 'ideal' victim of international criminal law. European Journal of International Law, 29 (3). doi:10.1093/ejil/chy056 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chy056 | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 11 October 2018 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 11 October 2018 | ||||||||
Related URLs: |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year