Men's Violence, Victim Advocacy, and Feminist Redress: Comment

Abstract

Stuart Scheingold, Toska Olson, and Jana Pershing (1994) draw from interviews with 15 people, including 5 leaders of vic- tim advocacy organizations and 7 members of the state legisla- ture, to show how a punitive ethos played itself out in legislation to control sexual violence. The lesson learned from Washington State's Community Protection Act (CPA) of 1989 is that mem- bers of victim advocacy organizations and grassroots social move- ments may practice a conservative law-and-order politics toward crime and justice. Scheingold et al. place their study within the terms of a debate, which they say has two sides. On one side are "republican and some feminist criminologists," who "are sympa- thetic to victim advocacy because they see victims as natural spokespersons for republican/feminist values and policies" (p. 730). The other side contains liberals of various types, "including civil libertarians, just desert theorists, and others not readily iden- tifiable with any general theory" (p. 734), "who see victim advo- cacy and/or republican criminology as a threat to the integrity of the criminal process" (p. 730). The authors conclude that while the Washington State victim advocates were both active players and pawns of politicians, "the net effect of victim advocacy is ... substantially problematic for republican/feminist values and for sound crime control policy as well" (p. 731).