Introduction

Christie's (1986: 17) seminal piece on ‘The ideal victim’ opens with remarks on being a victim: ‘It is often useful within the social sciences to rely on personal experiences, or at least take this as our point of departure’. He goes on to make two preliminary reflections before stating that he will concentrate on the sociology of the phenomena:

In the same way that Christie chose to introduce his ideas about the concept of the ideal victim with a focus on the sociology of phenomena, this chapter, as, indeed, the book as a whole, does likewise. My exploration of the sociology of phenomena invokes a case study that draws on personal experience; by using this as my point of departure, I illustrate a number of issues surrounding victims and victimhood. The case study is of the closure of the Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) aluminium plant at Lynemouth, Northumberland, in the north-east of England, where my husband worked for many years. I have already written about this closure from a feminist-influenced victimological perspective (Davies, 2014). Part of this chapter does likewise. However, the chapter as a whole gives a more sustained emphasis to the way in which Christie's work has impacted upon my own critical analysis of the closure. It dwells on the particular ways in which his insightful and highly original way of explaining his sophisticated theoretical propositions have steered my own thinking and victimological imagination. His work has impacted upon what I feel is important to write about. As a self-labelled feminist-influenced criminologist-cum-victimologist, I strive to make observations about my own position and relationship to what is happening in the social world. The case illustration that I have chosen to focus on in this chapter is personal but political, and it has been significant in terms of furthering my own understandings and conceptualisations of victim identity and experiences of harm and injustice, and of provoking me to be at pains to communicate the impacts of the global at the local and personal levels.