There are some very few things that are clearly defined and an entire universe of things that are not. Nearly everything gets harder to define the closer you look at it. Meaning is fractal, like Great Britain’s famous coastline. You’d think an island would be easy to define, wouldn’t you? Landmass in the sea. Easy. Land and sea are obviously different, solid vs. liquid. But then you try to actually measure the coastline and it turns out to be infinitely long, which doesn’t make any sense, because then how can it be bounded? Or you ask what the difference is between an island and a continent, and it turns out that you can’t come up with a definition that works for every case. What seemed so obvious moments ago is now lost, somehow, either completely impossible or vague to the point of uselessness.
I read a conservative writer the other day, never mind who, saying that one definition of conservatism is that, when it comes to crime, conservatives are always firmly on the side of the victims and not the perpetrators. The only reason to say this is to set up a strawman, the implication being that non-conservatives are on the side of criminals and (therefore) against the victims. I only have to gesture vaguely at the many conservative criminals who are still supported by conservatives to show that this is not true at all.
But there’s a bigger problem here, and it’s one of definition.
Firstly, not all crimes have clear victims. If you run someone down in your car on purpose, you’re a criminal and there’s a clear victim. If you commit a speeding offence but don’t hit anyone with your car, who is the victim? There’s a general sense that the ‘victim’ is the other road users you might have injured, but there’s no one specific, no one who’s going to appear in court and say something like, ‘That motorist is the one who sped near me!’ There are lots of crimes where we can say this kind of thing: vandalising public property, possessing drugs, taking bribes.
What’s worse for our effort to easily side with the victims is that there are some crimes where the only discernible ‘victim’ is the perpetrator. Not wearing a helmet or a motorbike in a car, for example, or possession of heroin. In these cases, to sympathise with the victim means taking the side of the criminal, because… they’re the same person.
‘Siding with victims’ can therefore only ever be a partial account of the supposed ideal conservative response to crime, because we can’t always say who the victim is or, where we can, the victim is in fact an irresponsible motorcyclist.1
But the problems for our conservative friend don’t end there! If a guy mugs me and steals my phone, then I’m the victim and he’s the criminal. With my conservative friend firmly on my side, I head out and stab the criminal, only for my friend to immediately switch sides. ‘Hang on,’ I say, blood still dripping from the knife in my hand, ‘I’m the victim and you’re meant to be on my side!’
‘Ah,’ says my friend, ‘But now he’s the victim, you see, because you stabbed him.’
‘But my phone hasn’t been unstolen, has it?’ I say. ‘So I’m still the victim of the original mugging.’
At this point, my friend splits in two, like an amoeba, in order to side with both of us. This means that he’s siding with criminals, too, which violates the the second half of his conservative crime credo. I point this out to both of him and he explodes, showering the surrounding area with fuzzy logic and conservative amoeba goo.
Again, it appears that it’s not possible to have an account of crime where you say ‘I side with the victims!’. In real life, I had a friend who brought a knife into school. He’d read hysterical accounts of teenage knife crime in the (conservative) news and had concluded that he needed to defend himself. Had he been caught with the knife, he’d have been expelled from school. He might also have been criminally liable, though I doubt they’d have pressed it. Was he a victim? I think he was a victim of nonsense peddled by right wing newspapers, personally, but your mileage may very. Fortunately, he realised it was a stupid thing to do before he ever got caught, so he stopped carrying a knife around.
At the time, he and I were both 16 and therefore in the age and gender demographic most likely to be the victim of a crime. Of course, we were also, by virtue of those exact same demographic realities, in the group most likely to commit a crime. Who should we side with, remnants of the amoeba of my conservative friend? The victims of crime or the people so scared of becoming victims that they commit crimes? Or the victims of the crimes they commit?
Of course, age and gender are hardly the only important demographics when it comes to discussion of crime, but they illustrate a broader point. In fact, however you cut up the demographics, the people most likely to be victims of crimes are also the people most likely to commit them. Most obviously, victims of poverty are also the people most likely to be victims of crime and the most likely to be criminals. So you can’t sympathise with people who are likely be victims of crime without also sympathising with people most likely to victimise them.
There’s a lesson here for the left, too. It’s easy to dismiss ‘tough on crime’ policies as ‘tough on poor people’. The complication arises because, as the group most likely to be victims of crime, poorer people in general tend to take a pretty dim view of criminals. After all, if you’re living in poverty and therefore intimately understand the kinds of pressures that lead people to commit crimes, but nevertheless don’t commit any crimes, you’re unlikely to sympathise with people who cite those pressures as the reason/excuse (YMMV) that they committed crimes.2 It’s easy to denounce policies on the basis that they victimise a particular group, but much harder if that group say they quite like those policies.
When you try and set up simple binaries, even with something as apparently straightforward as geography, you run into countless problems. When you try to make simplistic binaries a foundation of your political worldview, you cause problems because the simplistic worldview doesn’t map accurately on to the complicated world.
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Footnotes
- I don’t personally think that either possessing drugs or taking stupid risks on a motorbike should be crimes, partly because the only victims are the perpetrators, but that’s by the by. Fact is they are crimes and we can’t distinguish the victims from the criminals ↩︎
- My personal experience of criminals suggests that they tend to blame their victims for their crimes, rather than external social factors, but I’m sure some do. ↩︎
Frank Podmore 