Book review: Victims. Trauma, Testimony and Justice
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758015610859 |
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Author | Jenny Korkodeilou |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Ross McGarry and Sandra Walklate
Victims. Trauma, Testimony and Justice
Routledge: Oxford, 2015; 182 pp.: ISBN 9780415856331.
Reviewed by: Jenny Korkodeilou, Sheffield University, UK
DOI: 10.1177/0269758015610859
This is an excellent book and provides an ideal platform from which to start thinking and imagining
how victimology could develop and expand its ideological and methodological boundaries as a dis-
cipline. It offers a sophisticated, critically informed and stimulating analysis of crucial, but often
marginalized, issues related to victimization and its multilayered meanings. The authors provide a
consistent, rich and thought-provoking account that problematizes taken-for-granted notions about
victims and victimhood through the lens of trauma, suffering and justice. As a result, the book art-
fully invites the reader to think differently about the complexities of victimhood within contempo-
rary mediatized culture and the role of the (cultural) victimologist in grasping and documenting
social harms as a creative observer and moral entrepreneur.
The book consists of three parts and includes eight chapters that examine and problematize per-
ceptions on victims and victimhood through the concepts of trauma, testimony and justice. The
authors use case studies to illustrate further their main arguments and suggest different ways of
victimological thought and analysis. The authors make their intentions to stimulate critical reflec-
tions on the nature of victimization and its impact clear by formulating the titles of the chapters as
questions rather than statements.
In the introduction the authors outline and explain the rationale and structure of the book and its
chapters. They argue that the main purpose of the book is to expand victimological discourse and
imagination and thus encourage critical engagement and understanding of the multifaceted impact
of victimization. They do so by shedding light on and problematizing the notions of trauma, tes-
timony and justice.
In Chapter 1 the authors discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different victimological per-
spectives (positivist, radical, critical and cultural) and examine their main claims in relation to the
concepts of ‘suffering’, choice’, ‘power’ and ‘power relations’. They refer, for instance, to the
notion of the ‘ideal victim’ and its characteristics (e.g. innocence, vulnerability) and the ‘hierarchy
of victimization’ (e.g. deserving vs undeserving victims) and argue that these often underline pol-
icy interventions and determine which victims’ voices are heard or muted. They conclude that
‘acquiring the status of victim’ is a complex process that involves engagement with a range of cul-
tural interactions and processes such as identification, labelling and recognition (p.17). Another
interesting point made here is on how the media has rendered human suffering public, which they
achieved by focusing on distress and emotions in order to elicit sympathy and compassion, and
how the ideas of ‘ideal victim’ often affect media coverage of individual and collective suffering.
In Chapters 2 and 3 (Part I) the authors explore the extent to which the ‘victim narrative’ and the
‘trauma narrative’ can help us make sense of the impact of individual and collective victimization.
Similarly, in Chapters 4 and 5 (Part II) they suggest and discuss the use of testimony (testimonio)as
a different, more imaginative and creative method of understanding experiences of victimization
through victims’ own stories. They also illustrate the potential and limitations of the use of victims’
narratives as a means for social action and justice. With regard to the latter, they explain the dif-
ferent ways in which collective victimization experiences and associated traumas (e.g. the Bhopal
industrial disaster in India) are often made ‘structurally invisible’ and thus remain ‘hidden in plain
Book reviews 79
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