Victim Support and the Welfare State

About This Book

This book provides a rich analysis of the history of Swedish victim support. With the majority of research on victim support centering on the Anglosphere, this book offers a unique case study for considering the role of the victim in the criminal justice system. While Sweden has enacted many laws to support victims, and victim assistance programs have grown rapidly, welfare policy has become more restrictive and crime policy, to some degree, more punitive.

Drawing on archival material and interviews with key representatives for the Swedish Association for Victim Support (BOJ), this book examines what role the victim movement has played in a changing welfare state. It argues that BOJ filled a function in the decentralization and privatization of the Swedish welfare state and explores distinctive features of the Swedish victim movement and the form it has taken, as compared to that in other countries.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of criminology, sociology, social policy, civil society studies, and social work, and those engaged in studies of victims and victimology.

Reviews

“It is rare to have a comparative analysis of the genesis and evolution of victim support outside a small clutch of English-speaking countries. Victim Support and the Welfare State is thus special because it looks at the birth of just such a development in Sweden... We have had descriptions in the past of the links between welfare and incarceration, and welfare and crime rates, but none between welfare and victim services... [this book] is therefore doubly welcome, tracing, as it does, the shaping step by step of an unusual project through a succession of remarkably distinctive financial, political, and policy regimes.”

—Paul Rock, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics

“Victim Support and the Welfare State is a most stimulating analysis of a central development in criminal policy. By choosing a non-Anglo-American country as an object of analysis, the book reveals similarities as well as differences in the expansion of the crime victim issue... This intriguing book shows that victim support is both a cause and an effect of criminal policy and that the emergence of the crime victim clearly has an entrepreneurial character.”

—Henrik Tham, Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Stockholm University and former President of the European Society of Criminology

“This book consolidates and develops essential materials for researchers. It will undoubtedly be at home on the shelves of those interested in policy reform and advancement. Overall, Victim Support and the Welfare State offers an intriguing account of what is required for a new organization to be born and mature, something that would surely interest most civil society researchers. For those interested in crime policies, the book serves as an important reminder that victim movements do not always push for more punitive criminal policy.”

—Maija Helminen, Senior Law Researcher at University of Turku, Finland