Should We Pay ‘Wages for Victims’?: Victim Participation as Labour in Domestic and International Criminal Justice

• In Event: Decolonising State Crime and Transitional Justice

Abstract

Many victimologists see victims’ rights to participate in domestic and international criminal justice as empowering victims to have their say, share their experiences, engage in truth-seeking, and/or receive emotional closure. Critical scholars and victims’ advocates, on the other hand, fear that victim participation is too distant and juridical to be meaningful for victims. Legal scholars and practitioners, by contrast, are more worried that victim participation will unsettle the equality of arms and erode the defendant’s right to a fair trial. This article, on the other hand, conceptualizes victim participation not as a legal right or restorative justice measure, but as a form of unpaid socially reproductive labour. Indeed, observing the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) victim engagement in The Hague, Kenya and Uganda between 2013 and 2019 and conducting 134 interviews with the ICC’s judges, bureaucrats, victims’ lawyers, intermediaries, field assistants and victims, I was surprised by how exhausting justice felt and how much it looked like work both for the Court’s field staff and for victims. Why don’t we recognize victims’ labour? I argue that it has to do with the ‘who’ (victims), the ‘why’ (justice) and the ‘what’ (participation) of victim participation. Building on Marxist and Marxist-Feminist theory, the paper will first theorize victim participation as ‘a labour of love’ which sits on a continuum between exploitation and freedom. I will then make the case for why we should consider paying ‘wages for victims’ drawing on the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, not only to compensate victims for their labour time, but also to open up a broader political perspective on life-making, work and justice.

Author

• Leila Ullrich, Leila.Ullrich@crim.ox.ac.uk