Victims’ Rights and the Struggle over Crime in the Media

Abstract

This paper seeks to explain how crime victims have become increasingly visible in the criminal justice system and in media portrayals of crime by looking to the U.S. victims’ rights movement and its strategic mobilization of a particular construction of “crime victim” into the public sphere. Through analysis of the movement’s documentation of its media strategies and new forms of victim-oriented journalistic practice, the paper demonstrates how the movement portrays crime through its construction of crime victims as a class of citizens without rights, through which the families of murder victims become proxy-victims.