Book review: Victimology: A Canadian Perspective
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758020909936 |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
the issues presented. These cases also demonstrate the power of individual stories, viral media
campaigns, and ‘causes c´el`ebres’ to inspire others and provoke change.
This book is engaging and informative, mixing an impressive breadth of research on the
perpetuation of gendered violence, and its structural and cultural drivers, with vivid and often
heartbreaking individual stories. However, in constantly highlighting the need for a variety of
interventions at multiple levels of interaction, it can be overwhelming for those looking for
tangible, specific solutions to the pervasive issue of violence against women. This book is never-
theless an impressive feat of scholarship, and valuable for anyone interested in human rights and
globalization, gender-based violence, and public policy.
Jo-Anne Wemmers
Victimology: A Canadian Perspective
Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2017, ISBN9781442634831 (pbk.), x þ329p.
Reviewed by: Tyrone Kirchengast, Sydney Law School , University of Sydn ey, Australia.
DOI: 10.1177/0269758020909936
Victimology as a discipline has grown in exponential significance into the 21st century by offering
critical insights on victims as individuals and as participants in systems of criminal justice.
Wemmers’ Victimology: A Canadian Perspective is the book that consolidates the essential per-
spectives and advances debate for full review and evaluation of the rise and development of the
victim in criminal justice. Wemmers’ critical research focus of victim rights as human rights
significantly informs the content and organisation of the book, and the rise of the victim is
substantially explored across this institutional milieu. The book thus delivers an essential volume
that consolidates decades of work and aspirational law and policy reform, the arguments of which
are immediately recognisable as the work of one of the world’s leading victimologists. The book
identifies the victim as a theoretical construct that now bears on the development of justice
processes, rights and powers exercisable by victims for their own self-determination in a system
that had long forgotten their foundational role, together with the rise of therapeutic and ameliora-
tive approaches that afford victims and others, including offenders, the capacity to make personal
reparation within a system still primarily rationalised around the punishment of offenders.
The strength of the book lies in Wemmers’ ability to bring together that which the discipline of
victimology does at its best – connect the broader theoretical and cross-disciplinary contexts of
victim participation with the structural legal and institutional reforms that now provide new path-
ways to justice and, importantly, outcomes for victims. Drawing broadly from psychology and the
human sciences to demonstrate that enhanced victim participation carries risks and benefits to
individual victims, the book provides the interdisciplinary focus that supports the critical analysis
and exploration of arguments that promote discrete analysis of institutional reform. This provides
the book’s relevance beyond criminology to law and policy, via the disciplines at lar ge. The
Canadian focus is much needed at a time when progressive characters of decades past may be
jeopardised by present instruments, including but not limited to the Canadian Victims Bill of
Rights, which, despite much promise, has done so little to advance victim interests in a substantive
and individually meaningful way. It is here that Wemmers’ cross-disciplinary expertise garners full
force, critiquing those human rights frameworks – those that deliver, yet also those that fall short –
that contour the terrain of victim rights as human rights.
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