Book review: A Victim Community: Stigma and the Media Legacy of High-Profile Crime
| Author | Freya Rock |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/17488958221100646 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2023, Vol. 23(1) 158 –162
© The Author(s) 2022
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Book reviews
Nicola O’Leary, A Victim Community: Stigma and the Media Legacy of High-Profile Crime, Palgrave
Macmillan: Cham, 2021; 211 pp.: 978-3-030-87678-4, £99.99 (hbk), 978-3-030-87678-4, £24.99
(pbk)
Reviewed by: Freya Rock, University of Cambridge, UK
DOI: 10.1177/17488958221100646
A Victim Community: Stigma and the Media Legacy of High-Profile Crime explores how
residents of local areas in which a serious and high-profile crime has taken place form
and negotiate collective identities of victimhood. By presenting the findings of 2 years of
ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 39 residents of the towns of Dunblane and
Soham, both sites of high-profile murders in the late 1990s and early 2000s,1 the book
explores the impact on collective identities of the resultant mass-media and societal
response. It will, therefore, be of interest to those in the fields of media studies and com-
munications, as well as making a significant contribution to victimological scholarship.
Chapter 1 gives an overview of the phenomenon of certain crimes being met with a
mass-media response and introduces the book’s central idea of the ‘victim community’ as
a way of conceptualising the collective identities formed by the residents of Dunblane and
Soham. O’Leary’s core thesis is that those living in the so-called ‘tragic towns’ (p. 110)
felt a sense of community or connection with others in the physical locality as they learned
to live with the stigma that the towns had come to carry and dealt with the practical and
emotional effects of media intrusion. Chapters 2 and 3 complete the theoretical backdrop,
introducing key ideas about the formation of stigma (Goffman, 1963), the notion of ‘com-
munity’ in late modernity (Bauman, 2001), and the crucial role of media representations
of crime and victimisation in constructing victim identity (Greer, 2010).
Chapters 4 and 5 present the findings of the fieldwork in Dunblane and Soham,
respectively. Both crimes were met with an immediate and intense media response, lead-
ing to a powerful sense of collective identity among those living in the areas. While there
were similar findings from both sites, a unique aspect of the collective identity that
formed in Soham was that residents framed their sense of belonging in opposition to the
perpetrator and his partner who had only recently moved to the area: as one remarked,
‘thank goodness they weren’t Soham people’ (p. 132). O’Leary argues that the formation
1100646CRJ0010.1177/17488958221100646Criminology & Criminal JusticeBook reviews
book-review2022
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