Back in 2013, my co-editors and I showcased the relevance of Howard Becker's (1967) seminal article, entitled ‘Whose side are we on?’, to a range of scholars working in and around the field of criminal justice. The resultant volume, entitled Values in Criminology and Community Justice, proved to be a rich tapestry of academic and practitioner insight into the strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities and impediments, of addressing how personal and institutional ‘values’ may or may not inform and impact upon processes of criminal justice. Fittingly, similar issues related to morality, ethics and justice have been demonstrated by the contributors in the present volume. Although they have merely scratched the surface of understanding how idealised constructions of victimhood manifest in contemporary society, the contributions in Revisiting the ‘Ideal Victim’: Developments in Critical Victimology excellently demonstrate how Christie's ideas continue to thrive in the contemporary victimological imagination.

This is important as, prior to writing about the ideal victim, Christie (1977: 1) had taken the criminal justice system to task in another influential piece, ‘Conflicts as property’, in which he suggested that ‘Maybe we should not have any criminology. Maybe we should rather abolish institutes, not open them. Maybe the social consequences of criminology are more dubious than we like to think’. As a scholar who was (quite rightly) opposed to the term ‘crime’ and the punitive (as opposed to welfarist) treatment of people who had broken the law, Christie strove to present a different vision of ‘criminology’ that focused on processes of control rather than criminals themselves. He sought to reduce the infliction of pain – not just by individuals, but by institutions too. This shift onto the subject (rather than object) of harm is vital for ensuring that trauma, distress and hurt are eased rather than exacerbated.

While the victim-oriented model of criminal justice espoused by Christie may still prove evasive in many respects – not least due to the incompatibility of such a model in many current offender-focused systems – the ideologies behind it have informed a wealth of alternative and supplementary approaches to justice based on representation, reparation and restitution. The development of restorative and transitional justice movements in formerly deeply divided societies (such as Northern Ireland and South Africa) demonstrates the potential power that victims can have when given the space to have their voices heard.