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Abstract

This article advances a theory of the ‘relative’ nature of victim status, demonstrating that whether an individual is identified as a victim is, in part, conditional on their relationships with others. Using the example of victim identification in cases of child criminal exploitation, this article demonstrates that youth justice practitioners’ perceptions of young people's peer relationships and their relationships with their families had a significant impact on whether young people were identified as victims of child criminal exploitation. To explain this dynamic, this article then further explores the conceptual nature of victim status, focusing on its transient and finite qualities. In doing so, this article begins to address the relational gap in the study of processes of victim identification.

Keywords

child criminal exploitation county lines critical victimology relational sociology

Introduction

Research within victimology has long emphasised that being treated as a ‘victim’ is dependent on more than simply experiencing harm. In particular, work within the sub-field of critical victimology demonstrates not only that ‘victim’ is a socially constructed category (Quinney, 1972; Jankowitz, 2018), but also that becoming a victim is a social process (Miers, 1990; Rock, 2002; Spencer and Walklate, 2016); and that victim status is precarious (Strobl, 2004), contingent (Christie, 1986; Duggan, 2018) and negotiated (Dunn, 2001).

‘Interactional’ approaches, which examine the ‘interpretive and descriptive work through which assignments of victim status are made’ (Holstein and Miller, 1990: 104), have been a key focus within research aligned with the broad tradition of critical victimology. Existing work has explored the interactional production of victim status in a variety of ways: focusing particularly on assessments of victim ‘credibility’ made by practitioners, jurors and bystanders (Dunn, 2001; Ellison and Munro, 2009; Pugh et al., 2016), and on the role that the communication of narratives of victimisation plays in individuals’ understandings of their own victimhood (Meyer, 2016; Pemberton et al., 2019; Thunberg and Bruck, 2020).

Interactional approaches provide an insight into the roles played by acts of communication between individuals in the emergence of victim status. This article argues for an extension of this focus on interactions to explore the influence of relationships between individuals. The ongoing development of our understanding of processes of victim identification requires us to recognise victims as enmeshed in a network of social relationships. In doing so, we must be attentive to the impact that relationships between an individual and their peers, friends and family members may have on how and whether they are identified as a victim. As such, I argue for the importance of a ‘relational turn’ in victimology, to compliment increasing attention to relationships within criminology more widely (Weaver, 2015; Weaver and Fraser, 2022).

This article uses child criminal exploitation as a case study through which to explore the influence of relationships within processes of victim identification. Child criminal exploitation refers to the coercion, control, manipulation or deception of a person under the age of 18 into criminal activity (Home Office, 2019). It provides a particularly useful case study for exploring the relational aspects of victim identification because it is a highly relational offence, occurring within networks of interconnected individuals. In addition, it refers specifically to the exploitation of young people, whose social status means that they live uniquely interconnected lives, marked by a particular degree of interrelation with parents, practitioners and peers (Brown, 2005).

Although child criminal exploitation can in theory relate to any type of crime, in current policy and practice in Britain, it has most often been linked to county lines drug dealing. County lines refers to a model of drug distribution in which a dedicated mobile phone line, or other form of ‘deal line’ is used to coordinate the transportation of drugs out from urban areas, to sell in coastal, rural and market towns (Coomber and Moyle, 2018; Spicer, 2019). Child criminal exploitation occurs in the context of county lines when children are ‘coerced, controlled, manipulated or deceived’ (Home Office, 2019: 3) into storing, moving or selling drugs that are being distributed via the county lines model, either within or outside their local area (National Crime Agency, 2019). Young people involved in county lines drug dealing may either be convicted of drug-related offences, or they may be identified as victims of criminal exploitation and, at least in theory, can instead be diverted out of the youth justice system towards victim-orientated support services (Home Office, 2019).

Drawing inspiration from ‘relational sociology’, which asks us to centre ‘relations’ as a focus for analysis in the study of social life, this article explores how young people's relationships with others in their lives affected whether youth justice practitioners identified them as offenders involved in drug dealing or as victims of criminal exploitation. I develop the idea of victim as a ‘relative’ status to capture the conditionality of a young person's status as a victim on their relationships with others. This article proceeds as follows. First, it explores the relational gap in victimology and introduces ‘relational sociology’, specifically the work of Donati (2015), as a theoretical tool to address this issue. After a brief discussion of the methods of the research on which this article is based, I examine two ways in which young people's relationships with others influenced whether they were identified as victims of criminal exploitation. I find that when youth justice practitioners perceived young people as causing too much harm to others – specifically peers within the same drug distribution network and family members – these others’ status as victims (or potential victims) of that young person supplanted the young person's own status as a victim of criminal exploitation. To explain why victim status has this ‘relative’ quality, and specifically why it was difficult for multiple interconnected individuals to be recognised and treated as victims simultaneously, I then examine the transient and finite qualities of victim status. Through this analysis, this article demonstrates the power of relational approaches to generate new theoretical insights within victimology.

Becoming victims

Becoming a victim requires individuals who are harmed to identify with and claim victimhood (Thunberg, 2020), as well as the recognition and affirmation of their status as a victim by others (Strobl, 2010). As outlined above, within the field of victimology, critical victimology provides the most engagement with the ongoing processes by which individuals become known and understood as victims (Holstein and Miller, 1990; Miers, 1990; Walklate, 2007). Holstein and Miller's foundational theoretical work in this area advocates for a greater understanding of the ‘interactional dynamics of how persons become “victims”’ (1990: 104), examining the ongoing social dynamics and conditions of the practices by which we assign victim status to ourselves and others.

Research has begun to advance this ‘interactional’ understanding of the emergence of victim status in a number of ways. A significant body of scholarship that examines issues of violence against women has focused on practitioners’, and other relevant parties’, interpretations and judgements of victims’ behaviour in cases of stalking (Dunn, 2001), domestic abuse (Dunn and Powell-Williams, 2007) and rape (Ellison and Munro, 2009), examining the implications of this for perceptions of victim ‘credibility’. Relatedly, researchers have examined how factors such as racism and misogyny (Gekoski et al., 2023; Kulig and Cullen, 2017) shape assessments of victim ‘credibility’ and ‘worthiness’.

In addition, ‘narrative victimology’ focuses, in part, on the ways in which potential victims navigate victim identities through interactions and conversations with those who may offer recognition of victim status (Andersson, 2008; Tennent, 2019), and more specifically through communicating narratives of victimisation to an audience (Burcar and Åkerström, 2009; Green et al., 2020; Meyer, 2016; Thunberg and Bruck, 2020). This literature emphasises the importance of interactions, specifically in the form of dialogues between individuals, for the ongoing emergence of victim status.

Finally, a small number of studies have examined the role of relationships in the production of victim status. Existing research has touched upon ways in which potential victims’ relationships with peers and family members facilitate the emergence of victim status. For example, Pugh et al.'s (2016) study of bystander intervention in relation to sexual assault found that participants were more likely to recognise friends as potential victims than they were strangers. Here, the nature of the relationship between the victim and those with power to attribute victim status plays an important role in victim identification. Relatedly, Burcar and Åkerström's (2009) research with male victims of violence touches on the role that young men's families and friends play in allowing them present themselves as worthy victims, while maintaining their identification with hegemonic masculinities, by emphasising the severity of young men's injuries on their behalf. Although relationships are not a central focus of either study, both signal towards the role that relationships can play in facilitating the emergence of victim status.

Despite these advances, the roles played by social relationships in the emergence of victim status are still too often overlooked. Interactional approaches to understanding processes of victim identification focus on acts of communication, for example the assessments of credibility and acts of storytelling described above. Victimology is yet to expand its lens to foster a more broadly relational understanding of how persons become victims that engages with the impact of social relationships such as family ties or friendships. In addition, although the research described above begins to explore how relationships might facilitate victim status, less consideration has been given to the ways in which an individual’s relationships with families, friends and peers might present a barrier to the attribution of victim status. Finally, existing work could do more to examine the theoretical implications of the role of relationships in the emergence of victim status for our understanding of ‘victim’ as a concept.

These gaps within the broader field of victimology are also present within current research into victim identification as it relates to issues of exploitation. Existing research in this area has tended to focus on the macro level, exploring how state discourses and practices expand or restrict possibilities of victim identification (Gadd and Broad, 2018; Yea, 2015), or the impact of collective claims made by victims’ movements (Cojocaru, 2015; O’Connell Davidson, 2015). Where research has ‘zoomed in’ and examined the micro-level processes that determine the emergence of individuals as victims in everyday contexts, they have tended to focus on the influence of individual actors, rather than on relationships. For example, with regards to criminal exploitation, existing research has explored the impact of practitioner knowledge and training on victim identification (Ramiz et al., 2020; Sturrock and Holmes, 2015; Villacampa and Torres, 2017) or, more rarely, young people's rejection of victim status (The Children's Society, 2019).

What is missing, in relation to criminal exploitation and within victimology more broadly (Holstein and Miller, 1990; Rock, 2002), is an approach that considers the ways in which relationships between key players influence the production of victim status. Victim status is not produced in a vacuum. To fully understand processes of victim identification, we must also consider potential victims in the contexts of the networks of social relationships in which they are embedded and entangled. Furthermore, we must examine the ways in which the nature of these relationships influences whether individuals attain, or fail to attain, victim status.

Relational sociology

Relational sociology is a theoretical framing that can support the development of relational approaches to understanding processes of victim identification. The aim of relational sociology is to ‘depict social reality … in dynamic, continuous, and processual terms’ (Emirbayer, 1997: 281), and the framework explicitly centres relations as its main object of interest (Dépelteau, 2018). This kind of conceptual lens is well-suited for excavating the ways in which processes of victim identification are inherently relational – influenced by others within a potential victim's own network of relationships. By inviting us to look at any social object, and therefore at victim status, in relational terms (Donati, 2010), relational sociology opens up the possibility of exploring these dynamics further.

The ‘critical realist relational sociology’ developed by Donati (2010, 2015) provides a particularly useful conceptual lens for the study of the emergence of victim status for two reasons. First, Donati's work offers a flexible approach that is applicable to a broad range of social processes, emphasising that any sociological object can, and indeed should, be explored in terms of relations (Donati, 2010). In essence, Donati's framework of relational sociology simply asks us to take relations as a central focus of sociological analysis and reflection (Donati, 2010), and to explore the ways in which relations have their own ‘solidity’ and ‘concrete reality’ (Donati, 2010) meaning that they can have a significant impact (Weaver, 2015), for example on processes of victim identification.

In addition, Donati's ‘critical realist relational sociology’ offers a holistic approach, engaging with both structure and agency. Donati (2010) emphasises the dialectical relationships between personal and social identity and the relationships between entities at multiple levels stating that ‘relations … reflect the performance of an emergent reality between two or more people, groups, and even institutions’ (Donati, 2010: 17). Donati (2010: 43) is clear that ‘the relation does not eliminate the terms which it connects; instead it reclaims, explores and expresses them’, providing the researcher with licence to consider the role of individuals, relations and structures in the emergence of victim status. This is important because it creates space for a relational approach to the emergence of victim status that is cognisant of both the micro-level interactions and relationships between individuals, and the ways in which social contexts and individuals themselves inform and infuse these.

The application of Donati's approach to relational sociology enables us to consider the individuals participating in research as ‘individuals-in-relation’ and to consider the impact of their experiences in ‘relationally and emotionally textured worlds’ (Weaver, 2015: 47), thereby shedding light on previously underexplored facets of social processes such as the emergence of victim status. This approach resonates strongly with calls for a greater understanding of the interactional processes through which individuals emerge, or fail to emerge as victims (Holstein and Miller, 1990; Rock, 2002).

Methods

To examine relationships empirically, I draw inspiration from existing applications of Donati to topics of criminological interest. Weaver (2015) and Weaver and Fraser's (2022) work makes use of his relational sociology to examine the relational dynamics of group offending and desistance. Drawing on Weaver (2015), which used in-depth interviews, and Weaver and Fraser (2022)'s ethnographic observations, I use a combination of interviews and observations to examine relational dynamics. Specifically, this study involved semi-structured interviews with 50 youth justice practitioners and 17 young people conducted within in one English county during the period 2019–2020.

The practitioners included youth offending service staff (38) and police officers (12) all of whom had experience working with young people involved in county lines drug dealing for whom there were concerns about risk of harm from child criminal exploitation. Of the police officers, eight were members of a specialist police unit focusing on issues of child exploitation. To recruit these participants, I took a sign-up sheet to introductory meetings that I arranged with each staff team. I then followed up with interested people by email. This approach resulted in a near total sample of the youth offending service staff. Five staff members were invited to participate but declined on the basis of lack of availability or experience.

The young people were recruited through the youth offending service. To be sensitive to the potential impact of exploitation on them, including a lack of trust of adults, a feeling that saying ‘no’ is not meaningful and feelings of lack of control (Hackett, 2016), I introduced the research gradually, creating space for young people to ask questions, reflect on their participation and opt out at any time. Overall, 34 young people were invited to participate in interviews and 17 declined, giving a final sample of 17 individuals. All the youth participants were aged between 14 and 18 at the time of the research. Those who were aged 16 and over were assumed to be legally competent to consent or refuse to participate in research (O’Reilly and Dogra, 2016). Others who were aged 14–16 at the time of the research gave consent to participate themselves without the additional consent of their parent or caregiver under the principle of ‘Gillick competency’ (Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority, 1985). This approach was approved by the relevant university and local council ethics committees. Young people received a £20 voucher to compensate them for taking the time to participate (Liamputtong, 2007).

Caring for participants throughout the research was a multi-faceted process. I took inspiration from the ‘living ethical protocol’ developed by Brodie et al. (2018), reflecting on and discussing participants’ needs with them throughout the life of the project (see Marshall, 2021 for a full description). All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

The length of the interviews ranged from 28 minutes to 1 hour and 36 minutes for practitioners, lasting an average of 1 hour. The length of interviews with young people ranged from 20 minutes to 2 hours, and they lasted an average of 50 minutes. I made use of two interview guides, one for practitioners, one for young people, as a rough guide for discussion. However, the interviews followed a semi-structured approach allowing the researcher and participant to respond to and explore the lines of conversation that emerged through the course of the interview.

I also carried out over 100 hours of observations over the course of 18 months. These observations focused on activities that were relevant to processes of identifying victims of child criminal exploitation, such as risk meetings, referral meetings and supervision meetings with young people.

This research followed a critical realist grounded theory approach (Oliver, 2012). In practice, this meant that throughout the course of the research, interview recordings were transcribed by the researcher and were then analysed using NVivo alongside notes taken from observations. The grounded theory process involved initial, focused and theoretical rounds of coding, as well as the use of analytical memos to explore themes that emerged from both interviews and observations (Charmaz, 2014).

Drawing on this research, the sections that follow introduce the idea of ‘victim’ as a relative status, exploring the role that young people's relationships with family members and peers play in influencing whether they are identified, and identify themselves, as victims of child criminal exploitation. Having described the influence of relationships on the emergence of victim status, the article then moves on to explore why the assignment of victim status is dependent on an individual's relationship with others, exploring the transitory and finite nature of ‘victim’ as a concept.

Victim as a relative status

In making decisions about whether to take a victim- or offender-orientated approach towards young people involved in county lines, practitioners considered the nature of young people's relationships with others in their lives, including other peers involved in the same drug distribution networks and young people's families. Specifically, practitioners were concerned with the amount of harm that young people had caused, and the risk of harm that they posed to other individuals within their network of personal relationships:

We do have to accept that there will be children that at some point will become offenders and we will have to deal with them as offenders. At some point they will cross that line, because they will have committed so much harm to others … We’ve tried dealing with them as a victim and it hasn’t worked and now their risk to others is escalating to the point where we need to start going down the prosecution route. (Melissa, police officer).

Melissa is unambiguous about the impact of harm caused to others on the perception and treatment of young people. Her words emphasise a sense of inevitability regarding the eventual transition of young people affected by criminal exploitation who harm and continue to harm others from victim to offender. When practitioners perceived a young person to have caused too much harm or to pose too much risk to peers or family members, the young person's status as a victim was supplanted by that of those whom they had harmed, or risked harming, as opposed to existing alongside it. As such, ‘victim’ existed as a ‘relative’ identity, in that it was dependent on a young person's impact on others within their wider network of relationships.

Practitioners’ perceptions of young people's relationships with peers

The first and most significant way in which young people's personal relationships could affect their status as victims relates to situations in which a young person was seen to be harming other young people within the same drug distribution network, particularly where practitioners perceived a young person to be exploiting others. Practitioners emphasised that the longer young people were involved in drug distribution networks the greater the risk that they would become involved in recruitment and exploitation themselves:

if we aren’t able to extricate young people from it quick enough, I think that's a real risk that they then work their way higher up the food chain and then end up becoming recruiters and exploiters themselves. (Kevin, youth justice practitioner)

When practitioners perceived young people as having taken on the role of recruiter or exploiter this affected the extent to which they recognised young people themselves as victims.

For example, Christopher described the change in perception of Elijah, who was receiving support as a victim of criminal exploitation but was subsequently charged after being stopped by police with two younger people:

Elijah was arrested at the station in Stonewell with two other younger people – so suspected of encouraging them into getting into whatever he is dealing with … So for Elijah, being found at the station with two other young people would have been the day that the professional world switched their perception of him. So now he's exploiting other people therefore he's an offender, therefore we need to do this this and this. Whereas prior to that he is being exploited and we need to do this – instead of doing X we need to do Y. (Christopher, youth justice practitioner)

As Christopher attests, it is the perceived relationship between Elijah and these two young people that informs the transition in practitioners’ view of Elijah from victim of exploitation to perpetrator. Elijah's status as an offender is defined relative to the two younger people on the train, and ‘offender’ becomes the label that informs practitioners’ subsequent course of action towards him.

Similarly, officers also described finding it difficult to continue to treat young people as victims if they caused too much harm to others:

How much time can you invest in them as an exploited child compared to the amount of time we need to invest in them as exploiters of others? That seesaw balance has tipped and now we have to worry less about them and more about the risk they pose to other young people, and we’ve now got quite a few young people in that category now, that two years ago we were jumping up and down and screaming and worried about where they were and what was happening to them, and now we’re just worried about what they’re going to do to other people. (Arnie, police officer)

As Arnie demonstrates, when a young person is considered a risk to multiple others, the focus becomes the risk that they poses to these individuals, rather than the harms they may be experiencing. As in the case above, a young person might still be experiencing elements of exploitation. However, particularly in a context where resources were restricted, the nature of a young person's relationships to others within their peer group – and specifically their risk to other young people – carried the potential to erase their status as a victim. As such, a young person's status as a victim was relative to, and conditional on, their impact on others.

Practitioners’ perceptions of young people's relationships with family

Although the perception that young people were exploiting their peers was the most significant area where young people's impact on others affected whether practitioners took a victim-orientated or an offender-orientated approach, there were also other relationships that tipped the balance in subtler ways. One of these was the risk that young people posed towards others within their family networks, particularly those deemed to be vulnerable such as younger siblings, grandparents or parents with health concerns. Where these risks were felt by practitioners to be too great, the victim status of family members tended to take precedence over that of the young person.

A good example of this view was evident in practitioners’ concerns about the relationship between two brothers, Brandon and Zak, and their mother Sue. Across several risk meetings for Brandon and Zak, practitioners expressed concerns about the brothers’ visits to their mum's house and the impact of this on her as a ‘vulnerable adult’ with pre-existing mental health conditions. Over the course of several months, in the risk meetings themselves, concerns about Sue's vulnerability to her sons, rather than the vulnerability of the boys, became the fulcrum on which practitioner action turned. This culminated in the decision to ask local police to conduct additional monitoring to ensure that the Zak and Brandon were not visiting their mother's address, as this would be contrary to their bail conditions, in the hope that ‘if we catch them, it will safeguard mum’ (Stanley, police officer, fieldnotes). The team was mindful of the fact that this course of action ‘could lead to [Brandon and Zak] being remanded or locked up’ and that this might be ‘counterproductive to the work that we’re doing’ (Stanley, police officer, fieldnotes) with them as victims of criminal exploitation. However, in the end, the team took the decision to proceed with the additional police checks on the basis that ‘mum is vulnerable, so we have to take charge’ (Jan, youth justice practitioner, fieldnotes). This example demonstrates that in cases where young people's harm to others within their familial network was an increasing concern, attitudes towards young people affected by criminal exploitation could shift towards a more punitive approach if practitioners felt that this would safeguard other family members.

These kinds of shifts in attitude were also influenced by practitioners’ perceptions of the risks that young people might pose to younger siblings, a factor that could gradually add weight to the view of a young person as an offender rather than a victim. For example, concerns about a young person's potential to put younger siblings in harm's way could alter perceptions of a young person, as in Tyler's case:

Tyler was bringing random people home. People turning up to his house and asking for him in a threatening manner … and he's got younger siblings, so that was the end of it, the police advised [the family] to not have him there because of the younger siblings … I think their advice was change the locks. Because he was coming back and being quite – I don’t think he actually assaulted anyone, but he was just being aggressive, and threatening and stuff, and when you’ve got [younger siblings] in the house…. (Lola, youth justice practitioner)

In this situation, the perception of Tyler as bringing threat and risk into the family home is clear. It is important to note that this behaviour might not have been viewed as being as problematic or concerning had it not happened in such close proximity to his younger siblings. The practitioner's punitive response to Tyler demonstrates the importance of understanding the impact of the interactions between young people and others within their family network on the extent to which they are viewed and treated primarily as victims.

It is worth noting here, that in the examples described above, the assignment of victim status was also influenced by cases in which another individual in a young person's relational network better conformed to normative expectations of victims. Existing research, most notably Christie's (1986) seminal theory of the ‘ideal victim’, characterises these normative expectations as including: weakness and vulnerability (Christie, 1986); ‘respectability’ or ‘social value’ (Christie, 1986; Long, 2018; Stanko, 1981; 1982); innocence, blamelessness (Christie, 1986), passivity, helplessness and compliance (Holstein and Miller, 1990; Meyers, 2011; Strobl, 2010; Van Dijk, 2009). In relation to the examples provided above, it is fair to assume that it was easier for practitioners to recognise Tyler's siblings as victims, in place of Tyler, and Elijah's peers, as victims of his exploitation, because of their younger ages and resulting assumptions about their greater vulnerability. Similarly, it is likely that Sue's status as woman with a mental health condition rendered her a more easily recognisable victim than her teenage sons with their already substantial list of convictions.

Young people's perceptions of their relationships

The previous section focuses on practitioners’ identification of young people as potential victims of criminal exploitation. It is also important to address the question of whether the idea of ‘victim’ as a ‘relative’ identity was applicable to young people's own judgements about their own victimhood.

In this research, harmful interactions with families and peers appeared to be less relevant to whether young people considered themselves victims of exploitation. This is perhaps because young people tended not to foreground either the idea that they were victims, or that they had harmed others. For example, as described in more detail by Marshall (2022), it was common for young people participating in this research to frame their involvement in drug dealing as a survival strategy that helped their families to navigate socio-economic marginalisation. This resonates with Andersson's (2008) study of a young man's narratives of engaging in violence, in which the ‘victim–offender dichotomy’ is supplanted by a ‘hero–villain’ narrative, in service of maintaining a positive moral self-presentation that also aligns with the expectations of hegemonic masculinities. In the current study, young people's framing of themselves as supporting others financially through drug dealing tended to supersede the idea that their activities victimised other young people or placed their own families at risk.

On the rare occasions that young people did discuss behaviour that could be considered exploitative of other young people, they tended not to characterise it in these terms. For example, one young person, Patryk, explained the process by which he involved others in drug distribution:

I was just using my mates, well not using them but asking them if they wanted to do it with me. Not like just random people, it was just my mates, and it was like right you can come work for me. You’re my mate, you can come work for me, I’ll pay you this. And they always said yes. (Patryk)

The term ‘using’, quickly corrected in Patryk's account, hints at a suggestion that his actions may have incorporated imbalances of power associated with exploitation. However, in his clarifying comments, Patryk characterises his actions as simply those of a friend helping out his friends. Whether young people fully believed that they had not harmed others, were participating in practices of ‘neutralisation’ (Sykes and Matza, 1957) and did not feel able to engage in the painful process of accepting that they had caused harm, or were perhaps more able to see how multiple people could co-exist as victims, is difficult to tell and would merit further investigation in future research. However, it remains that ideas about ‘victim’ as a relative status appeared to be less of a significant factor in young people's considerations of victimhood, than for practitioners’ views of young people's victim status.

Reflections: Why is victim status relative?

This section draws on the theoretical and empirical literature from victimology to reflect on why ‘victim’ exists as a ‘relative’ status, partially dependent on the nature of young people's relationships with others. First, I examine the kinetic aspects of victim status as a precarious and transitory state. These qualities lay the groundwork for the transitions described above, in which young people's status as victims can be affected and altered as a result of their relationships with others. Second, I examine the influence of the ‘finite’ qualities of victim status to explore why young people's status as victims was supplanted by that of those whom they harmed – as opposed to co-existing alongside each other.

Victim status as transitory

The potential for young people's relationships with others to have an impact on their status as victims stems from normative understandings of victim status as transitory. Far from being conceived of as a permanent identity, the label ‘victim’ encompasses a deeply entrenched association with transience. Ronsbo and Jensen (2014) describe ‘victimhood’, as ‘ever-negotiated, impermanent and immanent’. Expectations of victimhood as an impermanent state create the conditions in which victim status can be lost or transferred to another.

The transient nature of victim status manifests itself in two ways. First, restrictive normative expectations mean that victim status is precarious and easily lost. The idealised expectations associated with the ‘genuine' or ‘credible’ victim, for example those outlined by Christie (1986) and described above, are extremely difficult to conform to in practice. As such, Minow (1993: 1432) describes ‘victimhood’ as ‘a cramped identity’ that restricts individuals to a narrow set of traits. Because the expectations associated with being a ‘credible’ victim are so restrictive, access to victim status is rendered highly precarious. For example, Dunn's (2001) work demonstrates the razor-thin line that women affected by stalking must walk, in which almost any action taken or presentation made has the potential to negatively impact their claims to victim status. Marshall (2022) demonstrates this in relation to young people affected by criminal exploitation, highlighting that the constricting behavioural expectations associated with being a ‘genuine’ victim fail to contain the complex and messy realities of young people's lived experiences, which spill out over the rigid boundaries of victim status. In the context of this research, young people who harmed, or who were perceived to have harmed, others violated stringent normative expectations of victims as passive, helpless and innocent (Christie, 1986; Meyers, 2011; Strobl, 2010; Van Dijk, 2009) and, as a result, experienced the full force of its precarity. The ever-present precarity of victim status creates an ever-present possibility of ceding victim status to another.

The association of victim status with transience is further compounded by normative expectations of victim status as something that individuals are quick to leave behind. Cole (2007) highlights the existence of normative expectations that victims will ‘ascend’ quickly into ‘survivorship’. Relatedly, as Thunberg and Bruck (2020) emphasise, expectations of ongoing victim-orientated support are likely to be met with social disapproval, creating further pressure to transition away from identification with the ‘victim’ label. As such, ‘victim’ is a time-limited identity, and the assignment of victim status comes with an expiry date built in. Again, the impermanence inherent within victim status helps to explain why it operates as a relative concept, because this impermanence allows for transitions in status to occur.

Victim status as finite

The relative nature of victim status is also explained by its finite quality. To unpack this statement, we must first examine the existence of the ‘victim–offender dichotomy’. Normatively, ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ are presented as antithetical identities (Dignan and Maguire, 2005; McEvoy and McConnachie, 2012), with the ‘offender’ providing the ‘other’ against which the ‘victim’ is defined and measured, exemplifying everything a victim must not be (Rock, 1998). The victim–offender dichotomy positions the law-abiding victim as deserving of protection and support, while simultaneously marking the offender as undeserving (Drake and Henley, 2014), in what Garland (2001) and Canton and Dominey (2020) have described as a zero sum game. This prevalence of the victim–offender dichotomy persists despite the fact that overlapping experiences of victimisation and offending are extremely common (Averdijk et al., 2016; Jennings et al., 2012; McEvoy and McConnachie, 2016; Pyrooz et al., 2014; van Gelder et al., 2015). Individuals are marked either as victims or as offenders and there is little space for hybridity.

We see aspects of the victim–offender dichotomy reflected in the experiences of victim identification described above. When transitions in how young people are perceived by practitioners occur, they are sharp and dichotomised. This is exemplified in the language used by practitioners, which describes young people as undergoing binary transitions from victim to offender. Practitioners described this as a ‘line’ that young people ‘cross’ (Melissa, police officer), a ‘seesaw balance’ (Arnie, police officer) or a ‘tipping point’ (Christopher, youth justice practitioner) at which the ‘professional world switches their perception’ (Christopher) of young people. Christopher further elaborated that:

You could almost nail it down to a single day when kids go from victim to offender. Kids go from vulnerable exploited kid into [slaps hand on table] drug dealing exploiter.

These phrases evoke the certainty of the transition and emphasise the difficulty of finding a grey area or middle ground in which a young person could exist as both a victim and as an offender. The victim–offender dichotomy permeates experiences of victim identification.

In relation to this research, the most salient aspect of the victim–offender dichotomy was the way in which it restricted victim recognition within a network of relationships. Specifically, the existence of the victim–offender dichotomy prevented the simultaneous recognition of young people, their family members and their peers as victims. When practitioners labelled a young person as an offender, the victim–offender dichotomy meant they struggled to sustain a simultaneous perception of that young person as a victim of criminal exploitation. This resulted in the loss of victim status for that young person.

When this victim status was lost, it was transferred to the person whom the young person had harmed, or risked harming. To explain this, Rock's (2002: 16) description of victimisation as ‘a process of alter-casting’, whereby ‘the victimisation of one can entail the criminalisation of another’, is particularly useful. Victims and offenders constitute each other. Each act of victimisation casts a new victim and a new offender. Crucially, they are perceived to exist within a dichotomised and dyadic relationship. When a young person committed a harmful act, the original ‘victim–offender’ dyad was erased and a new dyad was brought into being, this time with the young person cast in the offender role. This process of contradistinction was shaped by the fact that ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ are positioned as antithetical impermeable opposites. The existence of these dichotomised dyads imbued victim status with a finite quality. Victim status was not held by multiple individuals within a relational network, rather it was transferred between individuals.

The finite quality of victim status is central to its relative nature. The fact that access to victim status is limited and cannot be shared by multiple individuals brings its relative nature into play. The finite nature of victim status forces transitions in which networks of relationships are reconfigured, and victim status is supplanted as a young person takes on the role of offender, and the role of victim is conferred upon the person that they have harmed.

An interesting area for future research lies in the question of why victim status operates in a finite, and therefore relative, manner. Particularly when the prevalence of the ‘victim–offender overlap’ is so well-established in criminological research, why is it extremely difficult to hold space for multiple and overlapping experiences of victimisation and offending? These concerns connect to questions surrounding a wider propensity towards limiting claims to victim status. A preoccupation with policing the boundaries of victim status, which are misconstrued as concerningly porous, reverberates through our everyday interactions with the concept (Cole, 2007). ‘Victim’ is understood as a label whose application must be closely guarded to keep out imposters who would otherwise easily slip through. From the very moment of its recognition, victim status is subject to ongoing doubt regarding its authenticity, and to scrutiny as to whether the ‘victim card’ is simply being played for gain, a phenomenon that Ronsbo and Jensen (2014: 12) describe as a ‘fundamental ambiguity surrounding victims’.

Precarity, suspicion and practices of gatekeeping seem intrinsic to the emergence of victim status and researchers have explored two possible explanations for its closely guarded nature. Fohring (2015) develops work within psychology, drawing on Lerner's (1980) ‘just world theory’, which describes a human need to believe in a just, safe and meaningful world, to explain reluctance to recognise individuals as victims. Working within the discipline of political science, Cole (2007) locates the drive towards limiting claims to victim status within the western neoliberal project of advancing personal responsibility. Cole highlights that the association between victim status, blamelessness and passivity does not sit well with the perceived virtues of the ‘entrepreneurial, male, (Protestant) ethos’. Cole's work may well help to explain barriers to recognising young people as victims within the Youth Justice System in England and Wales, where a focus on the responsibilisation of young people for their offending emerged during the ‘punitive turn’ of the 1990s and early 2000s (Gray, 2007, 2009; McAra, 2017; Phoenix and Kelly, 2013), and continues to influence youth justice practice today (Day, 2023). However, within criminology, theoretical explorations of the reasons behind attempts to limit access to victim status remain scarce. Although further research is needed in this area, it remains that moves to limit access to victim status create a barrier to the recognition of multiple and overlapping experiences of victimisation and offending in the contexts of networks of relationships, cementing victim status as relative.

Conclusion

This article sheds new light on processes of victim identification in relation to child criminal exploitation. Taking inspiration from Donati's (2015) work in relational sociology, the article develops the idea of ‘victim’ as a relative status to explain how and why relationships with peers and family members can influence access to victim status among young people involved in county lines drug distribution. Where young people are perceived to have caused too much harm to others within a network of relationships of which they are a part, their status as a victim is supplanted by that of the person that they have harmed or risk harming. This process is explained by the transient and finite qualities of victim status. Future research should continue to explore the intersections of this process with a range of demographic factors including gender and ethnicity.

The relative nature of victim status has clear implications for young people affected by criminal exploitation. When access to victim status is restricted in this way, it is clear that some young people will miss out on victim-orientated interventions that could be supportive, or on diversion away from criminal justice interventions, which would also be beneficial. The observations on the nature of victim status provided above remind us of the importance of moving beyond dichotomies and binaries when it comes to victim identification. As Minow (1993: 1442) reflects on in her analysis of ‘victim talk’, ‘we would all be better off if we replaced “either/or” thinking with acceptance of “both/and” understandings’. This is certainly true for young people affected by criminal exploitation, and indeed for many other individuals whose experiences of victimisation are intertwined with experiences of offending. Meaningful and impactful work with people affected by these issues requires more acknowledgement of, and engagement with, the co-existence of multiple overlapping experiences of victimisation and offending both within individuals and within the networks of relationships of which they are a part.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number 2131944].

ORCID iD

Hannah Marshall

Author biography

Hannah Marshall is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include victimology, social justice, and young people's experiences of the criminal justice system.

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