amounts of research have been conducted into the impact of crime news. From the early 1980s, academics began producing evidence to suggest that the more crime stories people consume, the more they fear crime and the greater the demand for more police, more prisons and more punitive responses to crime.
The number of crime stories appearing in the British media has risen markedly. Criminologists had a happy time examining random samples of
The type of crime being reported also changed. In the 1940s and 50s property crimes featured frequently in news stories, but since the mid-1960s they have become rarities unless there is some celebrity angle. What the British press has increasingly focused upon instead is violence. The British Crime Survey estimates that approximately 6 per cent of crimes reported by victims are characterised as violent. But that is not the impression given by the media. One study focusing on one month in 1989 found that 64 per cent of the crime stories in the national press related to violence. On local television news bulletins in 1987 it was found that violent crime stories accounted for 63 per cent of all crime news.
Since our sense of the criminal justice system is shaped largely by the media, we could be forgiven for thinking there is a lot more crime and most of it is violent.
But there has been another change to crime reporting that has supercharged its impact, transformed the politics of law and order and, according to some, threatened to subvert the justice system. Barely mentioned in the 1950s, now centre stage is the victim.
No big crime story is complete these days without the press conference at which the police display the injured and bereaved. The cameras flash at every hint of raw emotion. Suffering has become a key component of these contemporary morality tales. This changes the way we think of criminality — from an offence against wider society to a matter of one individual harming another. It is a reversion to the principles of the ancient manor courts. It personalises crime. One might say it consumerises criminal justice. Victims sell papers, and the most effective are those who can be described as incontrovertibly innocent. The ‘blameless victim’ has become the most influential voice in the national debate about law and order.
The disappearance and murder of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in the village of Soham in 2002 resulted in deep political soul-searching and led to changes in the way the criminal justice system operates. The young girls’ faces are seared upon the conscience of the nation. Few, however, will remember 13-year-old David Spencer and 11-year-old Patrick Warren from Chelmsley Wood in Birmingham, even though their story is eerily similar. They went missing on Boxing Day 1996 and the suggestion is that they, like Holly and Jessica, were abducted and killed by a paedophile.
David and Patrick’s disappearance received a tiny fraction of the coverage that the Soham story did because they were not ideal victims. Both boys had been in trouble at school. One of them had been caught shop-lifting. On the day they went missing they had been scrounging biscuits from a local petrol station. They did not possess what has been described as ‘the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’. David and Patrick’s bodies have never been found.
Criminal reform in Britain has been driven by the emotional power of victims. The murder of 2-year-old James Bulger was a seminal moment in the politics of crime in this country: the justification for New Labour’s ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric and the inspiration for what’s been described as the crime policy arms race of the mid-1990s. Madeleine McCann. Stephen Lawrence. Sarah Payne. Damilola Taylor. Jill Dando. All these tragedies have changed the debate about crime and criminal justice in this country. They also all have at their heart an unambiguous victim.
The terrible deaths of Robert Knox, Jimmy Mizen and Ben Kinsella became the catalyst for press and political demands for action to deal with knife crime. While the victims of stabbings were young black men from drug-riddled estates in the inner cities, the calls for a government response were barely heard. Robert, Jimmy and Ben were all white boys described as ‘blameless’ by the press: Robert — the grammar school pupil who had appeared in a
The innocent faces of Holly and Jessica, Sarah Payne and Madeleine McCann ensured paedophilia was cast as the threat from the predator, the outsider, rather than the much more common but no less damaging abuse that occurs among families and close friends. The political response was inevitably shaped by the risk from the former rather than the latter. It is an important point: the focus on the innocent victim reinforces the concept of them and us. They are criminals. We are respectable. There is little room for ambiguity or nuance.
In 2002, the government announced that it intended to rebalance the criminal justice system to place victims at its heart. Ministers proposed a Victims’ Advisory Panel for England and Wales, accountable to Parliament and headed by a Victims’ Commissioner empowered to advise ministers on how to do things better. This alarmed senior figures within the legal world, who suggested it wasn’t so much rebalancing as destabilisation. The criminal justice system, they pointed out, is sanctioned by the state to protect the state. Prosecutions are conducted on behalf of the Crown, not the victim.
Senior politicians agreed. A committee considering the government’s proposals concluded that telling a victim their views were central, or that the prosecutor was their champion, amounted to a damaging misrepresentation of reality. ‘The criminal justice system is set up to represent the public rather than individuals, and there are good reasons for this.’ Ministers were accused of blurring the critical distinction between criminal (state) and civil (private) law. Putting crime victims ‘at the heart of the process’ implied a return to the days of the medieval feudal courts, when accuser and accused argued their case on equal terms. Such a move, it was argued, threatened the legitimacy of the justice system as protector of the wider public interest. It might also undermine the right to a trial based on objective testing of the evidence, rather than passion or sentiment.
Another consequence of putting the victim centre stage has been the rise of ‘penal populism’ — an increasingly punitive attitude to crime that has forced politicians and the judiciary into having to defend themselves against the accusation that they are ‘soft on crime’. When the press covers a big trial, it is usual practice to ask the victim of the crime on the steps of the court what they thought of the sentence. It is entirely understandable that most would have wanted the judge to have been tougher. Should they actually say they thought the sentence was fair, we cast them as curiously forgiving. No victim is ever likely to say the sentence was too severe.
Penal populism is not driven only by the media. The criminal justice system itself is sometimes complicit. In 2007 the Ministry of Justice put out a press release under the headline ‘Victims of crime want punishment’. It cited a survey which found that almost half (49 per cent) placed punishment as the most important part of an offender’s sentence. But read on and one discovered that 81 per cent would prefer an offender to receive an effective sentence rather than a harsh one and that an overwhelming majority of respondents (94 per cent) said the most important thing to them was that the offender did not do it again.
Part of the reason that most people in Britain still believed crime was rising fifteen years after it began to fall is that government ministers, police chiefs and others did not seek to challenge that mistaken view too strongly. In political terms there was a perceived danger that they would appear complacent, but also, pragmatically, they knew that resources tend to follow the problem; if the public were to accept that their chances of being a victim of crime were lower than at any time since government first started measuring these things in 1981, budgets might well have been cut. In fact, in the decade from 1995 in which recorded crime levels halved, the budget of the police increased by 40 per cent in real terms.
There is another reason as to why people believed crime was rising when it was falling — their relationship with the world just beyond their front door. As I discuss elsewhere in this book, when local roads, alleys and parks were busy with people walking about, communities effectively operated a watch and ward scheme by default. But the retreat from the street, the move from the public to the private domain inspired by the motor car and the television set, left large areas of our towns and cities unsupervised. Into this vacuum have moved the twenty-first- century equivalent of the ‘Boys & Girls, wandering & prowling about in the streets & by-places’. Loitering youth is, according to surveys, the single biggest source of community anxiety.
Just as Patrick Colquhoun looked to a police force to deal with ‘pursuits either criminal, illegal or immoral’ on the River Thames in 1795, so the public today look to the police to deal with antisocial behaviour in their neighbourhood. Britain’s obsession with crime and disorder reflects anxiety about the state of our society and has little to do with the scale of the threat. The sadness is that the fear feeds on itself and eats away at our quality of life.
