‘How do you get your voice heard when no-one will let you?’ Victimization at work

Abstract

A longstanding separation between corporate crime and ‘real’ or ‘conventional’ crime is both reflected in and institutionalized through state responses to corporate offending, excluding the victims of corporate crime from consideration or treatment as real victims of real crime. Experiences of this institutionalized disjuncture are treated in this article, through consideration of criminal justice, legal and regulatory responses to six cases of occupational death and those bereaved by it. Drawing upon data gleaned from semi-structured interviews, the article documents further processes of victimization through responses to this specific class of deaths, amounting to a denial of their very status as victims. The evidence presented here coheres with the wider, if hardly voluminous, literature on corporate crime victimization. The article concludes by discussing the wider significance of the struggle for victimhood, not least for criminology itself.

Keywords

corporate crime hierarchy of victimization safety crime victimology

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