by Christine Schwobel-Patel
Gaining victim status under international law is a fickle privilege – as
easily granted as it is taken away. Libya’s refugees and migrants who are
escaping the country’s economic collapse and violence are a testament to
the use and abuse of the victim label under international law. Within the space
of a few years, they have gone from being labelled victims of Muammar
Gaddafi’s brutal regime to being labelled illegal immigrants and part of a
‘swarm’.
Following the death of Norwegian sociologist and criminologist Nils
Christie on 27 May this year, several tributes were paid emphasising his huge
influence on the disciplines of Criminology and Criminal Law. His work has
been, with a few exceptions, far less influential in international law.
Yet, there is much international lawyers can learn from his ground-breaking
work, particularly that relating to ‘ideal victimhood’.
In his seminal piece from 1986, Christie introduces the figure of the
‘ideal victim’. The ideal victim is ‘a person or category of individuals, who,
when hit by crime, most readily are given the complete and legitimate status of
being a victim’.[1] In other words, there are some individuals who are considered more
deserving of victim status than others. As Basia Spalek points out, it is the
ideal victim in whose name victim services are justified.[2] This is important for international law given the frequent reference to
victims of conflict and victims of international crime to justify various forms
of interventionism.
Victimhood has huge rhetorical currency in the international sphere:
Military intervention is considered legitimate if the plight of the victims has
been documented; an international arrest warrant for a warlord is
justified if there are large numbers of victims who have suffered. From
Christie we learn that this invocation of victimhood comes with certain
socially constructed notions of who qualifies as a deserving victim. For
Christie, the ideal victim in his home country is ‘a little old lady’. He
paints a picture of the little old lady who, on her way home from caring
for her sick sister, is hit on the head by a big man who robs her for
alcohol or drugs. He identifies five attributes of ideal victimhood: (1) the
victim is weak (female, elderly), (2) the victim was carrying out
a respectable project (caring for her sister), (3) she could not be blamed
for where she was (she was in the street during the daytime), (4) the offender
was big and bad, and (5) the offender was in no personal relationship to her. Furthermore,
he also observes that the victim must be able to command just enough power to
establish their identity as an ideal victim but ‘be weak enough not to become a threat to other important
interests’.
These attributes can be slightly modified for the international sphere.
Arguably, the ideal victim in international law has three attributes: (1) The
victim is vulnerable and weak, (2) the victim is dependent, and (3) the victim
is grotesque. Vulnerability and weakness is often accorded to women and
children. It is often they who are invoked when an intervention by powerful
states in less powerful states, particularly the formerly colonised world, is
being justified. Dependency is a crucial aspect for victimhood,
articulated in Christie’s statement regarding the victim’s relationship to
other important interests. So long as a victim is deemed dependent on
assistance, they do not pose a threat. If, however, a victim displays
agency which goes beyond establishing their identity as an ideal victim, say by
taking up arms against their aggressor or by deciding to migrate to one of the
intervening countries, they quickly lose their ‘ideal’ status, if not their
victim status altogether. Finally, an ideal victim in the international sphere – a victim
of conflict or of international crime – often has some visual features which
brand them as victims. This may be the colour of their skin more generally, but
usually it is a distended tummy, a mutilation, an amputated limb.
This bodily manifestation of victimhood can be referred to as ‘grotesque’. It
is this in particular which prompts empathy in the ‘civilised’ world yet also
creates distance; a feature which distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them’. The
ideal victim of the international sphere, then, matches the typical fundraising
images of international NGOs – a black (or at least non-white) child who
displays the scars of poverty and conflict.
These three features can arguably be regarded as a currency in
a global victim industry. Those victims who display all the mentioned
attributes are not only ‘ideal’ for rhetorical purposes, they are also ideal
for economic purposes. These victims will induce empathy among donors, will
silence competitors, will attract the attention of the international media, and
will legitimise the funding of military intervention. Invocation of these
victims guarantees legitimacy in the name of humanitarianism and global
justice. Suffering has become commodified.
Christie teaches us the importance of identifying how victimhood has
been socially constructed for questioning the purposes of invoking victimhood. Why did
the former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno-Ocampo
and US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton jump on the bandwagon of exaggerated accounts of
Viagra-fuelled mass rape allegedly committed by Gaddafi’s forces ‘against his
own population’ shortly after the military intervention in Libya in 2011? Why
is it that people from the same Libyan population four years on, trying to
escape their conflict-ridden country, are now referred to as ‘illegal
immigrants’? When David Cameron went on his ‘liberator tour’ to Libya with
French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy in September 2011, he referred to the
Libyan victims of Gaddafi’s regime as demonstrating the ‘courage of lions’. In
2015, with Libya a conflict-ridden country (a condition notably brought
on by the so-called ‘liberation’), Cameron referred to people from this
population as a ‘swarm’ of people trying to migrate to the UK. The construction of the same
people as going from ‘ideal victims’ to aggressors in the space of just
a few years is significant for posing some critical questions. The next
time we see the faces of anonymous victims take up the entire billboard of the
marketing strategy of humanitarianism, we should ask ourselves, in the spirit
of Nils Christie, what it is that these images are really for?
[1] Nils Christie, “The Ideal Victim” in From Crime Policy to Victim Policy, ed. Fattah E.
A., (London: Macmillan, 1986) 18 (17 – 30).
[2] Basia Spalek, Crime Victims: Theory, Policy and Practice (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
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