Constructing Victims' Rights: The Home Office, New Labour and Victims
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00579_7.x |
| Author | Joanna Shapland |
that whales are ‘‘royal ¢sh’’might perhaps ¢nd that this new science con¢rms the
wisdom of the common law.
Birks,i none of his ¢nal articles also emphasised that it was a‘nurseryschool truth
that a series which begins with contract and wrongs must end with categories of
the same kind^categories ofcausativeevent, notcategories of response.’ (P Birks ‘A
Letter to America: The New Restatement of Restitution’ (2003) 3 Global Jurist
Frontiers1 at 20). Hopefully the Reporter of the new Restatement will not incor-
porate an overinclusive meaning of unjust enrichment such as that taken by these
two extraordinary works of recent scholarship, but we will wait anxiously to see
the structure which is adopted and the interpretative methodology which is pre-
ferred.
Jame s Edel man
n
Paul R ock ,ConstructingVictims’ Rights: The Home O⁄ce, New Labour and
Victims,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, xxv þ583pp, hb d75.00.
PaulRock has writtena series of distinguished historicaland sociologicalanalyses
of nationalpolicies relatingto victims of crime, ¢rst aboutCanada and then about
England and Wales, taking the story through the 1980s and early 1990s. This
volume covers just four short years, from the advent of the ¢rstNew Labourgov-
ernment in1997 to 2001. In that time, however, we had the development of vic-
tims’charters as the programme of modernisation of government swept through
and past the Home O⁄ce, major discussion about victim impact statements, the
enactment of measures for vulnerable witnesses in court, measures stemming
from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, a major expansion of restorative justice,
changes in relation to compensation and an EU Framework Decision, each of
which receives due attention in this work.
It is often said, disparagingly, of sociology that it cannot respond to recent
events, requiring at least ¢ve years to ‘make sense of things’.This carefullycrafted
argumentis an exception to that rule,managing to draw together an intricateweb
of policies,strategies, politicalruses, agencies’ obduracies, civil service manipula-
tions and Macmillan’s oft-quoted ‘events, dear boy, events’ into coherent stories of
the development of policieson victims.To stand back and contemplate over such
a short time-span is impressive, yet sometimes curiously unsatisfying,since we are
aware that the political frame has shifted again and what was seen in 2001 as the
thrust of policy-making was turned aside by other imperatives.The central plank
of the book is the development of o⁄cial discourse into an acceptance of some
form of victims’rights for England and Wales. But in 2005, it is very unclear that
there has been such an acceptance, partly because of implementation failure of
many of the initiatives described in the book, and partly because of substantial
continuing resistance from the traditional criminal justice actors.
n
Keble College,Oxford.
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135The Modern LawReview Limited 2006
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