Abstract
The rise of victims’ rights and interests in common law systems has featured significantly in the victimology literature of the 21st century. Strauss-Walsh’s contribution through critical enquiry into the history of the victim of crime in Ireland is distinguished, adding significantly to the field. He does this through detailed analysis of the jurisdictional issues facing Ireland as it navigates its position in Europe and the common law world, but as distinct from Britain and its common law history. Ireland is a leading light in the reintegration of victims into the adversarial criminal trial and Strauss-Walsh makes this case strongly through a ‘histories of the present’ approach, which has proven so ground-breaking in recasting criminal justice concerns from the perspective of the victim. The extent to which the victim is procedurally ‘present or absent’ allows Strauss-Walsh to interrogate ‘ruptures in the established offender-based narrative of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries’ (p. 2) for a purposive examination of the victim in the development of Irish criminal justice, aside from common law colonial rule.
The book is set out in three parts that logically divides Strauss-Walsh’s analysis with the 18th century as the relevant starting point of his genealogy. This period is significant for it represents the transformation of the trial from altercation to adversarial, where the Crown or state gained institutional capacity to remove the victim as private prosecutor for Crown Advocates, supported by a combination of growing policing power and the capacity for the state to mandate punishment, increasingly in the form of carceral imprisonment.
Part 1 allows for the unique historical context of Irish criminal justice that identifies causative social and legal factors that led to the removal of the victim from justice processes. Certain of these – decline in private prosecution, corruption, cost, and a lack of direct supports – have been traced elsewhere, but Strauss-Walsh goes further, defining the Irish context of the decline of British rule, and reformation of Irish law and procedure promulgating an organised legal system for Ireland.
Part 2 identifies the rise in victimology and feminism as consciousness-raising, mid-20th century, movements that spawned greater identification and concern for otherwise hidden harms and victim groups, including for those victims of sexual and domestic violence. Other sociological events affected the relocation of victims from criminal procedure, including increasing crime rates of the 1960s, greater victim reporting of crime, and a reliance on state authority. However, other moments recast the victim in greater prominence. The Troubles is identified as reframing public attention to victimisation and atrocity, rendering public consciousness ‘much more victim centred’ (p. 60). Changes to advocacy, media, qualitative victims’ surveys, and the recognition of child sexual abuse, all of which increased the victim’s ‘sociopolitical capital’ (pp. 75–79), complete this complex examination of competing factors that represent Strauss-Walsh’s powerful analysis of the contested status of the victim as they emerged into the modern period in Ireland.
Part 3 assesses the victim’s juridical reintegration and the emergence of the victim as a rights-bearing agent of justice. The influence of human rights discourse, the impact of supranational and regional instruments, and swift adaptation of local procedural justice for Irish victims, such as special protections of vulnerable victims during trial, define this period. Greater recognition of victims by the Irish judiciary (see Casey v The DPP, Ireland and the AG (2015) IEHC 824) helped inculcate victim rights within domestic Irish criminal justice. The rise of due process over aspects of the law of evidence and the leading work of Ireland in the development of independent legal representation for vulnerable victims indicate the evolution of the victim in domestic processes of Ireland. This is one development that could have been further emphasised given Ireland’s international leadership regarding adversarial procedural criminal trial reform, as these are reforms which many common law states continue to grapple with. Modifications to bail processes, victim impact statements, the introduction of new criminal offences to better protect victim groups, the growth of victim charter rights, and trial procedural reforms, complete Strauss-Walsh’s examination of the modern period.
Strauss-Walsh’s analysis of the re-emergence of the victim in Irish criminal law and procedure provides a detailed read of the historical removal and development of the victim. His book catalogues, with substantial detail, the incremental rise of the victim in the modern period, into the 21st century. Ireland’s leadership as a pro-victim law reform state is highlighted from the complex history traced. The detailed genealogy of the ‘complex interplay of social, political, cultural, and legal factors, that all combine to bring about change’ (p. 170) is the strength of this book, which ought to be part of any concerted study of criminal law that maintains a focus on victim rights in the Irish justice context.
