There seems to be a consensus in contemporary scholarly writing on victims of crime in the UK that they had first been ‘lost’, but then ‘rediscovered’ by criminal justice (cf Sanders, 2002, p 200). For some commentators, recent policy initiatives represent a ‘watershed’, with the interests of victims now nearing the top of the political agenda (Reeves and Mulley, 2000, pp 125, 144). A number of initiatives have been introduced from the 1960s onwards to make criminal justice more inclusive of victims, once the ‘forgotten actors’ of the criminal justice system (Sanders, 2002, p 200). This initial neglect of victims up until the late 1970s was mirrored by neglect on the part of criminologists (Rock, 2002, p 1); but a concern with victims now constitutes a major focus of academic criminology. However, criminologists’ perspectives on measures to make the criminal justice process more inclusive for victims have been far from positive. Joanna Shapland has argued, for instance, that after over three decades of policy initiatives, ‘there is little idea that victims are fundamentally woven into justice – that justice incorporates both victims and offenders’, and scrutiny of the difficulties that victims continue to face indicate the ‘need for criminal justice agencies to reach out and respond to victims’ (Shapland, 2000, p 148). Some commentators who believe that there has been a ‘shift in culture’ in criminal justice, and that the initiatives for victims are a ‘cause for celebration’, have also argued that victims’ interests have ‘become hijacked by the traditional criminal justice agenda’, with victims’ causes being appropriated to promote particular standpoints in the punishment and rehabilitation of offenders (Reeves and Mulley, 2000, p 144). On this claim, Sanders has argued that the ‘idealised interests and views of victims’ have been ‘used to legitimate punitive segregation’ (Sanders, 2002, p 209), with the consequence that ‘victims are being used in the service of exclusion’ of offenders (Sanders, 2002, p 222).

Much of the scholarly research and writing on victims and the criminal justice process has focused on initiatives to include victims in the progress of their own cases, but there has been far less concern with the inclusion of victims as actors in the criminal justice policy process.