I previously posted about victim-offender relationships (here), involuntary ties that form between a victim (including a victim's family members) and an offender after a crime has been committed that may prompt a preoccupation with the offender or a perception that the offender is in control of the victim's life. I recently completed a law review article detailing how legal institutions can mitigate the negative effects of victim-offender relationships to help avoid further trauma and to help victims move on with their lives; the abstract to this article appears below, and the article can be downloaded from SSRN here:
This article argues that, in the aftermath of violent crime, a relationship that is both negative and involuntary can form between crime victims and offenders. This relationship fetters the victim to the crime and the criminal, rendering it difficult to recover from the transgression. To illustrate how such a relationship may form and what consequences it may have for victims, this article uses the Oklahoma City bombing as a case study, documenting through the use of original interviews an involuntary relationship in which victims' family members and survivors perceived they were tethered to Timothy McVeigh. This perceived relationship with McVeigh aggravated family members' and survivors' emotional and psychological wounds, delaying their healing. The article further argues that this relationship originated in media coverage of McVeigh that portrayed him as defiant, remorseless, and unemotional, and that it was further developed at trial when family members and survivors were profoundly disturbed by McVeigh's conduct. To minimize the harmful effects of victim-offender relationships, this article proposes that victim services workers educate victims about the possibility of such a relationship, help victims cope with media coverage of the defendant, and assist victims in understanding defendants' behavior during trial. Finally, it recommends that opportunities for voluntary victim-offender mediation be made available to help mitigate the negative consequences of these victim-offender ties.
Of course I would welcome any comments on this piece; please send them to [email protected].
This unabashed bit of self-publicity does serve a purpose. I've been reading quite a bit about neural bases of punishment desires, and I believe that the concept of the victim-offender relationship complicates our understandings of why we punish. Scholars (see for example De Quervain et al., "The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment," Science 305 (August 27, 2004) have noted that we desire to punish others (and presumably derive satisfaction from doing so, as evidenced by neural scans) for norm violations. The notion of the victim-offender relationship reveals that the norm violations for which we punish are more complex than the commission of a crime--they may extend to the offender's courtroom behavior, the offender's media communications, or even to factors outside the offender's control, such as the amount of media coverage about the crime and the offender. This suggest that there is not really merely one norm violation, but rather series or layers of norm violations. It would be interesting to study not only the act of punishment itself, but the emotional affect engendered by an offender's maddening conduct, and the resulting gradual buildup of anger that renders the desire to punish an outgrowth not only of the offender's crime itself, but also of the offender's subsequent behavior.