The power of professional ideals: Understanding and handling victims’ emotions in criminal cases
| Author | Louise Victoria Johansen,Lin Adrian,Ida Helene Asmussen,Lars Holmberg |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02697580221100566 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02697580221100566
International Review of Victimology
2023, Vol. 29(2) 236 –258
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02697580221100566
journals.sagepub.com/home/irv
The power of professional
ideals: Understanding and
handling victims’ emotions
in criminal cases
Louise Victoria Johansen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Lin Adrian
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Ida Helene Asmussen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Lars Holmberg
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
This article explores how criminal justice actors interpret and process victims’ emotional
expressions. On the basis of a qualitative study on the interactions between legal institutions
and victims of violence in Denmark, the article demonstrates how police officers, prosecutors,
victims’ counsel and judges each separately understand and evaluate victims’ emotional reactions.
These actors interpret victims’ feelings according to their own professional roles and motivations
so as to gain an overview of a case and the actions required of them in relation to it, resulting in
quite different perceptions of victims’ needs and degree of trustworthiness. At the same time,
professionals also interact across institutions by writing and exchanging case files, and in so
doing police officers’ perceptions of victim reactions are often disclosed to both prosecutors
and judges. This article contributes to existing knowledge of how different professional ideals
specifically influence the handling of victims and their emotional needs, while the more general
consensus on ‘appropriate emotions’ simultaneously generates knowledge across professions and
institutional settings.
Corresponding author:
Louise Victoria Johansen, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Karen
Blixens Plads 16, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark.
Email: Louise.Victoria.Johansen@jur.ku.dk
1100566IRV0010.1177/02697580221100566International Review of Victimology X(X)Johansen et al.
research-article2022
Article
Johansen et al. 237
Keywords
Victim emotions, police, courts, categorization, professional roles
Introduction
This article examines how Danish criminal justice actors use their professional self-understanding
to evaluate and handle victims’ emotions. Investigating emotions has become a more accepted
approach to understanding interactions between legal institutions and lay people (Bandes and
Blumenthal, 2012), resulting in an increased number of studies examining how, for instance, judges
and prosecutors are actively involved in emotion management during criminal trials which are
otherwise characterized by strict ideals for conduct. While part of this research focuses on profes-
sionals’ management of emotions (Bergman Blix and Wettergren, 2018; Flower, 2019; Mack and
Roach Anleu, 2005), other studies have described how legal professionals interpret lay people’s
expressions and how, for example, one may evaluate defendants’ remorse in relation to questions
of guilt and punishment (e.g. Bandes, 2014; Johansen, 2019; Tata, 2010, 2020; van Oorschot et al.,
2017). Defendants’ emotional reactions have thus been subject to extensive research interest; how-
ever, victims’ emotions and the impact they have on legal professionals remain less well-explored,
just as differences between the roles of the police and courtroom actors are seldom explored within
the same research projects on victims (for exceptions, see Shapland et al., 1985). We argue that
professionals’ own ideals actively co-construct victims’ needs and supposed credibility, resulting
in the formation of different attitudes towards victims.
Existing literature on the significance that legal professionals attribute to victims’ emotional
expressions is mostly based on experimental psychological studies which ask a larger cohort of
‘observers’, typically college students, about their reactions to victim emotions in contrived crime
cases (van Doorn and Koster, 2019). These studies rely on extensive quantitative data and may
demonstrate how credibility ratings depend on connections between the kind of crime, the victim’s
sociodemographic profile and the feelings expressed (Ask and Landström, 2010; Bosma et al.,
2018; Rose et al., 2006; Wrede, 2015). Following this line of inquiry, we are able to analyse how
feelings constitute a ‘shortcut’ for people to obtain knowledge about what kind of victims and cases
they are facing, and how they would or should consequently react to them in real life. Considering
that lay people have predominantly been studied in these situational settings, we do not gain much
insight into how professional self-understandings may shape these interpretations of victim emo-
tions, or, moreover, what it must be like to handle these emotions as either a police officer or a
judge in a specific institutional and spatial context. This perspective, which is at the same time
sensory, professional and processual, is crucial in order to understand how police, prosecutors,
lawyers and judges act by virtue of their professional roles when they handle victims’ emotions. In
this regard, qualitative sociological studies have inquired into the ways in which criminal justice
actors at the police station or in court cope with their own and/or others’ emotions. Literature on
how the police handle victims’ emotions often highlights police officers’ difficult working condi-
tions and emotional labour (Bakker and Heuven, 2006; Horwitz et al., 2011; Lumsden and Black,
2018; Turgoose et al., 2017). In their study of legal actors in Swedish courtrooms, Bergman Blix
and Wettergren (2018) show how legal actors ideally try to achieve an ‘unemotional’ performance
of justice by exercising a professional management of emotion. As suggested, these different stud-
ies typically focus on only one institutional space, be that the police station or courtrooms. Research
To continue reading
Request your trial