NCJ Number
223159
Date Published
2007
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This chapter identifies reasons why victims of corporate crime are invisible to, silenced by, and ignored by victimologists and policymakers in the course of identifying and developing services for "ideal" crime victims.
Abstract
Typically, persons defined as crime victims are limited to a narrow range of crimes, primarily murder, aggravated assault, forcible rape, and robbery. Crimes linked to corporate and powerful offenders such as consumer fraud, corporate behaviors that risk the lives and health of workers and the general public, and war crimes that involve corporate government institutions typically have no structure for identifying victim needs and harms with a view toward providing appropriate victim services and remedies. In his ground-breaking text, "Silently Silenced" (2004), Thomas Mathiesen developed a framework for understanding mechanisms of silencing resistance to the crimes of the powerful in advanced capitalism. Criminologists and victimologists exclude data collection and analysis of corporate crime from their research activities, which creates a void in empirical research on the nature, harms, causes, and government responses to corporate policies and behaviors that significantly harm the public. Also crucial to the silencing of victims of corporate crime is the moral and political priority given to the unrestricted freedom of the free-enterprise capitalist system, whose advocates tout the importance of nonintervention in any corporate activities that serve to restrict profit-enhancing policies. This means that corporate harms are often not even defined as crimes, so there are no crime victims. Making victims of corporate crime visible usually occurs only when the actual victims and their advocates make their voices heard with such volume and persistence that politicians perceive that their positions of power are in jeopardy if they do not act to protect and serve victims of corporate crime. 7 notes and 72 references