Articles

• Schwöbel-Patel, Christine 1

Abstract

The role of victims is increasingly central to discussions in, and practices of, international criminal law. This increased attentiveness to victims, I argue, is leading to a visual and discursive specification of victimhood. Drawing on criminologist Nils Christie’s theorizing of victimhood, and identifying practices inside and outside the international criminal law courtroom, I discuss the social, political and legal construction of an ‘ideal’ victim. The features of an ‘ideal’ victim of international crime are identified as being: (i) weakness and vulnerability; (ii) dependency and (iii) grotesqueness. The features coalesce into a feminized, infantilized and racialized stereotype of victimhood. I argue that this problematic construction of the ‘ideal’ victim is to be contextualized within the ‘attention economy’. The ‘attention economy’ views attention as a finite and highly in-demand resource that rewards the extreme and spectacular at the expense of the moderate and considered.

• 1Senior Lecturer, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom