Creating the Victim of Environmental Harm: An Interactionist Perspective

• In Event: 600 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Constructing Crime and Victimhood

Abstract

An interactionist perspective will be used to examine and understand the victimization of environmental harm. Basically, this approach rests on the assumption that the status of environmental victim is not something objective but the ongoing outgrowth of a multitude of actors’ claims-making activities through social interactions. The meaning of environmental victimization is generated by claims-makers’ interpretative practices and subjected to contextual influences. Initially, a full elucidation of the interactionist perspective as a theoretical framework for analyzing victimization of environmental harm is presented. Then, under this analytical framework, I move on and unfold the social process by which the status of environmental crime victims is produced and reproduced within organizational, social and cultural contexts. Indeed, the highly nuanced and complex nature of victimization of environmental harm pose challenges to gaining a complete and sophisticated understanding of the social process of victimization. Accordingly, the social process of manufacturing the victim of environmental harm will be revealed on the basis of prominent claims-makers and their claims-making activities as indicated in each subheading. Finally, the social process of environmental victimization in the making will be summarized in the conclusion.

Author

• Jize Jiang, University of Illinois-Chicago