Drizzling sympathy: Ideal victims and flows of sympathy in Swedish courts
| Author | Nina Törnqvist |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02697580211035586 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/
International Review of Victimology
2022, Vol. 28(3) 263 –285
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02697580211035586
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Article
Drizzling sympathy: Ideal
victims and flows of sympathy
in Swedish courts
Nina To
¨rnqvist
Uppsala University, Sweden
Abstract
By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article
examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status
in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care
for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely
entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are
narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in
Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a
central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and
victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to
facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges
engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows
that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal
actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal
interaction order in court.
Keywords
Sympathy, ideal victims, victimology, court, law and emotion
Introduction
The judicial ideals of objectivity and impartiality are closely associated with dispassion (Maroney,
2011) and there are few professional arenas in which the ideological division between rationality
and emotion is today as profound and robust as in the legal arena. Within the growing field of law
and emotion, empathy has been discussed as involving a risk for bias (Abrams, 2010; Bandes,
Corresponding author:
Nina To
¨rnqvist, Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Box 624, SE – 751 26 Uppsala, Sweden.
Email: nina.tornqvist@soc.uu.se
264 International Review of Victimology 28(3)
2009; Nussbaum, 1996). However, many scholars in this field have shown how empathy enhances
objectivity and professionalism among legal actors (Bandes, 2009; Roach et al., 2005; Westaby
and Jones, 2018; Wettergren and Bergman Blix, 2016). Among other things, empathy is considered
to be crucial both when assessing and when anticipating people’s acts and rationales and when
managing one’s own and others’ emotions in court (Wettergren and Bergman Blix, 2016).
Although intrinsically linked to empathy, sympathy seems to adopt a more haunting shape in
relation to the way legal actors and researchers understand how it affects legal thought and
practices. While Henderson (1987: 1584) describes sympathy as inherently inappropriate to the
legal context, ‘a flood of feeling’, I will argue that sympathy is better understood as a light drizzle,
backgrounded but evanescently present. As this paper will show, sympathy can assume multi-
faceted meanings in the legal context: as promoting involvement, and as affecting evaluations of
victim status, thus threatening impartiality and professionalism. The main aim of this article is to
explore the forms and flows of sympathy in court by investigating how victim status invokes care
and concern among legal actors.
Drawing on ethnographic data from an ongoing research project in Sweden, including observa-
tions from court hearings and judges’ deliberations as well as shadowing and interviews with
judges and prosecutors, I have chosen to analyze three cases involving victims who to a varying
extent meet the criteria for ‘ideal victims’ (Christie, 1986) in more depth. To further our under-
standing of the practical use of sympathy in court interactions, I develop the concept of ‘sympathy
cues’. Expanding on Clark’s (1997) idea of cues as invitations for specific emotions, in the legal
context sympathy cues refer to information about the complainants or about their relationship to
the defendant that strengthens their vict im status. Thus, a sympathy cue emphasiz es victims’
vulnerabilities, their ‘irreproachability’, or highlights the power imbalance between the victim
and the perpetrator. Using different means, prosecutors, victims’ counsels and defense lawyers aim
at evoking sympathy for their client among the judges. Sympathy cues may be used both to make
another legal party feel for a victim or perpetrator and to make them feel with them. Using
sympathy cues to enable feelings for one party would prompt ways of caring for that person and
her or his plight. Sympathy cues that aid feeling with the same person would instead elicit empathic
imagination and perspective-taking. As a concept, sympathy cues can highlight how empathy and
sympathy work in tandem in legal contexts, thus contrasting with an understanding whereby
empathic imagination is viewed as advancing legal thinking while sympathy flows are seen as
impeding these same processes.
In a similar way to developments in other countries, the needs of and sympathy for crime
victims have become a prominent part of the political discourse on crime and punishment in
Sweden (Hermansson, 2019). At times when increasing public and political demands to enhance
victim participation in the criminal justice process are interpreted as an emotionalization of law
and its processes (Karstedt, 2002; see also Garland, 2001), directing closer scrutiny at the appeals
to sympathy and victim status found in criminal court proceedings may provide a vital contribution
to critical victimology as well as the field of law and emotion. Involving a focus on practices of
care and concern, studies of sympathy in the legal setting hold the potential to raise questions about
how to serve the well-being of and provide redress to victims as well as noting possible biases and
unwarranted differences between victims with different statuses.
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