Towards a Victimology of State Crime

Dawn Rothe, David Kauzlarich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136185694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Derechos humanos

Millions of people have been victimized by the actions and omissions of states and governments. This collection provides expert analyses of such victimizations across the world, from Europe, the United States, and Africa to New Zealand and South America. Leading scholars in the area of state crime describe the nature, extent, and distribution of state crime victimization, as well as theoretical and practical paths for understanding, explaining, and aiding victims of massive harms by governments.

Cases of state crime and state victimization are presented on Brazilian, Native American, and New Zealand children, Somalian Pirates, Columbian, South African, and Bosnian civilians, United States immigrants, and war crime victimization in World War II. Other chapters delve into formal and informal ways to address victimization through the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, and provide analyses of justice processes around the world.

This anthology bridges the latest thinking, theory and research in the fields of state crime and victimology and provides a general resource concerning basic issues related to victimization - particularly victims of state crime. As such, it fills a major gap in the literature by providing the first text and scholarly book focused solely on a victimology of state crime. This book is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, socio-legal jurists and academics with an interest in state crime and victimology.

PART I

State crimes, harms, and victimizations

1

A VICTIMOLOGY OF STATE CRIME

Dawn L. Rothe and David Kauzlarich

Introduction

As the fields of state crime and victimology mature and grow, it is more important than ever to consider how victims and offenders differ from one type of crime and circumstance to the next. Traditional victimological analysis was developed well prior to the point in time that state crime studies became a major subfield of the study of white-collar crime. Both state crime scholars and victimologists have much to learn from one another, and in this chapter we develop some ideas to further explore and encourage this intellectual connection between the fields.

The realm of victimology and state crime

The field of victimology emerged in the 1940s after World War II. Hans von Hentig and Benjamin Mendelsohn are most often cited as being the “fathers” of victimology with their early research on victims and street crime. The concept of “who” to study as victims included a call for a specific victimology (Hentig 1948) – crime victims as defined by criminal law, and a general victimology – those involved in accidents, crimes, and natural disasters (Mendelsohn 1956, 1974). Overall, the early works by Hentig, Mendelsohn and others, including Marvin Wolfgang (1958), suggested that the victim’s behavior and attitude were part of the causal explanation for their victimization. Consequentially, victims shared the responsibility of specific crimes, including homicide. Beginning with the late 1970s, some victimologists began to focus on victims of “political crimes,” including the mass disappearances of citizens in several countries in Latin America (Schafer 1977) as well as “structural victimization” (Nagel 1974). During the 1980s, other victimologists attempted to move the field to a broader focus including victims of human rights and abuse of power (Bassiouni 1988; Elias 1985; Separovic 1985). This was also the time when a call for a radical victimology approach was promoted. This included “victims of police force, the victims of war, the victims of the correctional system, the victims of state violence, the victims of oppression of any sort” (Quinney 1972: 315). However, as with criminology during this timeframe, the general focus remained on victims of street crime or what Bienkowska (1992) called penal victimology (Mawby and Walklate 1994). While still marginal within the discipline, over the course of the past three decades, some victimologists have expanded their focus to include the victims of natural disasters, war, and genocides. For example, the concept of stepwise processes of victimization has been usefully applied to the preparation of victims during the genocide by Nazi Germany (Kirchoff 2010). In essence, a stepwise process reflects the gradual preparation involved in mass victimizations. This includes beginning with unequal protection and dehumanization of a group. From this, an initial selection of victims (e.g., adult males) occurs that facilitates “normalness” with the crimes and violence which can then be expanded to include larger targeted populations (e.g., females and children). This removes an individual’s “moral calculi” from the act of violence. Such a pattern of preparation is often seen in cases of human rights violations. Ironically, the “father” of white-collar crime, Edwin Sutherland, was perhaps an earlier victimologist than either von Hetig or Mendelsohn as his first edition of Criminology included a chapter titled “The Victims of Crime” (Sutherland 1924: 62–72). Yet, relatively few criminologists or victimologists note this. Instead, he is generally credited for his theory of Differential Association and as the first scholar to expand criminology beyond criminal law violations to include white-collar crime.

Sutherland’s call for criminologists to expand their attention to include white-collar crime – violations of civil regulatory law – provided a much-needed long and historical debate over what is a “crime” (e.g., regulatory law, human rights, domestic criminal law, international public law, or social harms) and who can commit a criminal act (e.g., individuals, corporations, or states). This call for an expanded standard is at the heart of the field of state crime. The field of state crime studies is typically seen as having emerged from William Chambliss’ 1989 American Society of Criminology Presidential address on state-organized crime. Exploring crimes such as piracy and smuggling, Chambliss showed how states can be crucial in the organization and support of activities that violate their own laws and international laws when doing so fulfills their broader political and economic objectives. A number of criminologists, particularly critical criminologists, quickly adopted the concept, broadening and enriching the field (Barak 1991; Friedrichs 1998; Tunnell 1993). Their early work focused not only on crimes tacitly supported or organized by a sovereign polity, but also on actions committed on behalf of states themselves. However, the early research on state criminality was plagued by definitional issues and generated much debate regarding whether the individual or the state (organization) was culpable for acts deemed state crime and what standards should be used to define state criminality. These two contested areas cut to the core of the field of criminology in general, thus it was not surprising that this debate influenced the early development of the field, and in some cases continues today. Regardless of the remaining contentious issues associated with standards and definitions, since the onset of criminological inquiry concerning state criminality began, the field has grown exponentially. For example, literature has been produced on state crime with topics ranging from the U.S. invasion of Iraq (Kramer et. al. 2005), the illegal use of and threatened use of nuclear weapons (Kauzlarich and Kramer 1998), the on-going genocide in Darfur (Rothe and Mullins 2007), crimes against humanity in Uganda (Mullins and Rothe 2008), the U.S. role in and lack of response to Hurricane Katrina (Faust and Kauzlarich 2008), to the many cases of state-corporate crime such as the Challenger disaster (Kramer 1992; Vaughn 1996), Imperial Foods, ValuJet cases (Mathews and Kauzlarich 2000), and more recently cases involving Halliburton (Rothe 2006a) and Abu-Ghraib (Rothe 2006b). Additionally, there are now two comprehensive texts on state crime, Penny Green and Tony Ward’s (2004) State Crime and Dawn L. Rothe’s (2009) State Criminality: The Crime of All Crimes, and six edited anthologies on state crime, including State Crime and Resistance, edited by Elizabeth Stanley and Jude McCulloch (2012); State Crime in the Global Age, edited by William Chambliss, Raymond Michalowski and Ronald Kramer (2010); State Crime, Current Perspective, edited by Dawn L. Rothe and Christopher W. Mullins (2011); and State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government, edited by Raymond Michalowski and Ronald Kramer (2006). Additionally, John Hagan’s (2010) Who Are the Criminals? The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan examines both state policies towards street crime as well as acts of state crime within and beyond the borders of the United States. Scholars of state crime have also devoted significant energy to discussing the issues of control in relation to state crime including states’various domestic responses to their own criminality (Ross 1995, 2000) to international responses and controls (Rothe and Mullins 2006a, 2006b, 2011). Nonetheless, relatively speaking, the victims of state crime remain largely ignored as the focus over the course of the past two decades has primarily been on the etiological and enactment factors and controls, save for a limited number of articles or book chapters dealing with victims of international crimes (Letschert, Haveman, de Brouwer and Pemberton, 2011). The exception to this are two articles by David Kauzlarich, Rick Matthews, and William Miller (2001) titled “Toward a Victimology of State Crime” and (2003), “A Complicity Continuum of State Crime,” that propose a typology of victims of state crime. Previously we noted that from the onset there was, and to some degree remains, a definitional debate surrounding state crime. At core, the standard of defining state crime will impact the subsequent defining of victims of state crime. As noted by Kauzlarich et al. (2001: 175), “An important task in developing a victimology of state crime is to enumerate the victims, a task hindered by the lack of a uniform definition of state crime.”

Consequentially, the following section provides a brief overview of this debate prior to our discussion of its impact on how victims are operationalized, included in or excluded from research.

Returning to the definitional quagmire

The idea of a state being criminally liable was met with significant resistance. There were those criminologists that denied state criminality was possible. However, within the international legal arena, the notion of a state as an actor that could be held accountable was already well underway as the concept of a state as an entity possessing individual rights and subject to criminal liability emerged back in the mid 1900s. On the other hand, scholars who supported the idea of state criminality were divided upon the standards to be used to define such acts as criminal between those who favored a legalistic frame and others who favored a broader frame ranging from social harms to human rights. The tensions and debates over defining state crime, however, reflect a broader debate within criminology itself. Utilization of state-produced legal codes has long been the stated and unstated norm. Such a reliance on state-produced definitions has caused tensions within street crime and white-collar crime studies, with critically orientated criminologists rejecting state-produced definitions. The political nature of law production has long been the main rationale for this rejection, given that one cannot separate the nature of the political process that guides legislatures (and legislators) from the legislation produced. Further, states have an inherent drive to fulfill their own self-interest and not define harmful and problematic behavior as criminal (especially their own).

Standards

The debates over the definition of state crime go beyond merely critiquing the source or the substance of a given classification as alternative formulations were put forth. For example, in 1970, Herman and Julia Schwendinger suggested using a humanistic approach that would draw from objectively identifiable harms to humans and violations of human rights as the core definition of crime (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970). Others have advocated that crimes are any socially injurious actions, regardless of the actor in question. Still some scholars have advocated that state crime should be defined by a social audience that recognizes the act as deviant. What’s more, some criminologists have called for the abandonment of the concept of crime entirely in favor of zemiology, the study of harm, thus, a social harm standard (Hillyard, Pantazis, Tombs, and Gordon, 2004). In general, two positions on standards to be used to classify state actions as criminal remain within the broader definitional debate amongst scholars of state crime: crime as a social harm definition and a legalist approach. The legalist approach includes a state’s own domestic law as well as the broader umbrella of international public law (customary law, treaties, charters, and the newly emerged criminal law) (Rothe 2011). This framework includes other approaches and standards such as human rights and social and economic harms. Furthermore, international criminal law covers individuals as well as states, thus resolving any enduring reservations of the state as actors versus individuals. Additionally, the legalists’ use of extant statute identifies an external reference point, while other approaches are said to use a more amorphous and relativistic definitional rubric. Those that accept the use of a legalistic standard suggest that it adds legitimacy to the field’s definition. Legalists argue that if a critique of state crime studies is that they are not truly scientific but rather politically inspired diatribes, establishing the illegality of such actions under a legal code is a fitting response to such critiques. Nonetheless, this approach has been critici...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Part I State crimes, harms, and victimizations
• Part II Responses to state crime victimization
• Index