Introduction

Since Christie produced his seminal paper on ‘ideal victims’ in 1986, one of the most significant developments in UK criminal justice policy has been the creation of anti-social behaviour (ASB) legislation to govern nuisance and sub-criminal conduct. From 1998, a vast number of ASB tools and powers have been introduced to tackle behaviour that ‘caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as [the perpetrator]’ (Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (s.1(1a))). This broad legal definition allows a wide range of behaviours to be interpreted as anti-social, extending from noisy neighbours and verbal abuse, to graffiti and fly-tipping. This chapter will critically deconstruct notions of ASB victimisation by focusing on conceptualising individual and community experiences of ASB in order to determine the extent to which Christie's ideal victim framework applies to these contemporarily controlled phenomena.

In order the set the scene, an overview of the extent of ASB victimisation is provided. This highlights the subjective nature of ASB and outlines some of the issues associated with trying to measure the amount of ASB victimisation. A summary of the prevalence of ASB in England and Wales follows, alongside details about the characteristics of those people that are most likely to be victims. Once the context of ASB victimisation has been established, attention turns to individual victims of personal ASB. The definition of personal ASB is explored before the degree to which these types of victims are conceptualised as ideal and non-ideal victims is considered, with specific reference to real-life cases and the impact of wider political and social policy discourses. The final section explores an area that Christie (1986) did not consider: communities as victims. His ideal victim framework is applied to communities that suffer from nuisance and environmental ASB in public spaces to determine the utility of his thesis in these circumstances.

Contextualising and understanding ASB victimisation

Christie's work focuses on victims of crime. When he wrote his piece, ASB was not defined in its current form and so could not be discussed alongside the crime-related examples used to demonstrate the ideal victim framework. However, Christie (1986: 18, emphasis in original) made an important point about victimisation that resonates with ASB, he said: ‘Firstly, being a victim is not a thing, an objective phenomenon.