Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carrie A. Rentschler is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Feminist Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.

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Second Wounds

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

acknowledgments.........................................................................ixintroduction THE VICTIMS' RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND THE SECOND WOUND.........................1one LAW AND ORDER The Dominant Ideology of Victims' Rights.............................33two AN ACTIVIST HISTORY OF VICTIMS' RIGHTS.............................................55three MEET THE PRESS Representing Victims' Rights......................................83four UNDISCLOSED SOURCES Victims' Rights and Journalism Training.......................113five PROFILES OF LIFE News Memorials to the Dead.......................................137six FACES OF MURDER....................................................................177conclusion GIVING FACE TO THE FAMILY AS VICTIM.........................................211notes...................................................................................223bibliography............................................................................233index...................................................................................257

Chapter One

This chapter focuses on the dominant law-and-order dimensions of victims' rights, its punishing politics and talk of defendants' rights and legal permissiveness against which the rights of victims would be defined. Law and order signifies a political ideology vis-à-vis crime that focuses on crime control and the containment and warehousing of those deemed criminal. Beginning in 1964 with Barry Goldwater's run for the U.S. presidency on a crime control platform, the law-and-order movement gained momentum over the 1970s as part of the right-wing movement's political ascendency (see Beckett 1997). By the 1980s, law-and-order policy became a central feature of federal politics in the United States under President Ronald Reagan, and in the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The term law and order crystallizes a number of specific meanings about criminal justice, "above all, that law could and should produce order, but failed to do so because of weak enforcement." The primary purpose of the law as law-and-order advocates see it is crime control, yet lawmakers were also the movement's greatest adversaries. Many advocates felt "shackled by excessive due process restraints that frustrated effective enforcement" of legal measures of crime control (Reiner 2007, 119). In this context, in which calls for crime control were starting to be made in the name of victims, as Alyson Colewarns, "American discourse is dominated not by claims of victimization as much as by claims against victims" (2006, 2).

I want to probe the law-and-order movement's ventriloquism of crime victims as it defined the movement for victims' rights. The law-and-order movement was a key site for the production of the language of victims' rights. By the 1970s, victims' rights would replace law and order as a rallying cry for those who blamed prosecutorial leniency and constitutional rights protections for criminal defendants for the social problem of crime and its victims (Kaminer 1995). My analysis relies on evidence found in a collection of policy texts, task force reports, and political commentary identified with law-and-order perspectives on crime and criminal justice that constitute the dominant discourse of victims' rights. How law-and-order advocates imagined victims' rights and the victims it represents has had profound implications for criminal justice policy and the activities of victims' rights activists over the 1980s and 1990s, once the movement nationalized. Law-and-order conceptions of the victim of victims' rights redefined the issue of criminal justice away from crime toward the control and incapacitation of whole populations in the United States deemed dangerous and criminal by white ruling elites.

The story of the victims' rights movement really starts in the middle of its forty-year history in the United States. Its ascendancy was achieved in 1982, with the publication of the Final Report of the President's Task Force on Victims of Crime. From a movement perspective, the task force report of 1982 signaled the national arrival of victims' rights, evidence that its discourse and political practice were part and parcel of a national policy vision of victims. The report set the national policy agenda and political apparatus for victims' rights, presenting sixty-eight recommendations to "balance the scales of justice" by creating constitutional rights of participation for victims within the criminal justice system, while some of its authors simultaneously advanced assaults on defendants' rights in other venues (e.g., Task Force on Violent Crime 1981). Reagan had called for the task force in 1982 to help launch a federal law-and-order agenda defined around victims and their (lack of) rights. The task force held hearings around the United States, at which it heard testimony by crime victims, victim advocates, and people working in criminal justice as well as other social institutions, such as churches and hospitals. The portrayal it cast of victims' experiences of criminal justice called out for broad reform, specifically around the constitutional rights of victims.

According to the report, the hearings compiled a picture of "all crime victims in America." Its imagination of the social totality of crime victims in the United States took unique form in the case of a textual victim composite, a kind of worst-case scenario of institutional victimization that looked nothing at all like a typical crime victim. This was the point, for the report sought to identify all the possible forms of harm a victim could suffer after a crime and then defined these harms as kinds of victimization on a par with criminal victimization. Victims were created not by crime alone but also, more significantly, by their encounters with the criminal justice system. In its vision of victims, the report is a testament to the law-and-order focus of most victims' rights politics, with their emphasis on the criminal justice system as the main barrier facing victims and their search for justice (see Henderson 1985; Aynes 1983/84). It argues that this same system should be reformed to serve the needs of victims—needs understood to be in conflict with the rights of defendants. In the process, the composite victim distilled the worst-case scenario as a dominant rhetorical feature of national victims' rights texts. That the report made this point through a fictional chronicle of the travails of a composite figure rather than through a single victim testimonial also points to the authors' belief in the political power of compound fiction—the creation of a single fiction out of a multiplicity of testimonials.

There is much to be learned from the forms such policy documents take as well as from their content. As the anthropologist Annelise Riles argues, policy documents are "aesthetic objects with uses distinct from their qualities as `texts,'" but they have often been treated as little more than "instruments of political or ideological control" in which the analyst uncovers the hidden work of norms within them (1998, 378). The norms of the task force report, however, "are not hidden but made...