The Victim as Concept

Abstract

Governmentality identifies that regulation is constituted by micro instances of rule rather than by a centralised power or agent. Governmentality challenges the assumption that regulation is effected by centralised government over a constituency, arguing instead that regulatory practices exist everywhere, in the particular, such that macro regimes of rule can be deconstructed into their constitutive rationales and programs (Foucault, 1982, 1991; Dean, 1999). When viewed in light of this perspective, the history of the crime victim as a common law subject maps a different narrative than that traditionally offered by legal theorists, victimologists and criminologists alike. These theorists identify the victim in terms of empowerment, or disempowerment, arguing that the victim is deprived of their right of participation in criminal justice by the dominance of the state in controlling criminal prosecutions and punishment. Rather than view the history of the victim as the struggle for rights against an all dominant state, as articulated through post-modern perspectives arguing for the plurality of the victim subject, governmentality provides a means for divining the genealogy of the victim from the history of criminal law and justice. Foucault (1984: 89) puts this process in terms of an ‘effective history’.