Introduction The Victims’ Rights Movement and the Second Wound

Abstract

My story begins with two female crime victims: Kitty Genovese and Elizabeth Smart. Genovese was the victim of a high-profile murder in 1964. Smart was the victim of a kidnapping in 2002 and survived to be returned to her family. The Genovese case marks the first stirrings of victims’ rights activism, a tale in which the murder victim was, according to one reporter, “never the story” (see CQ Researcher 1994; Rasenberger 2006, 65). Genovese’s story is told through journalists’ racialized imagination of street crime, its victims and villains, in New York City, the same year in which two of the city’s boroughs erupted in riots. The Smart case, a media-saturated story of abduction, polygamy, and sexual assault, signals the dominance of a victims’ rights orientation to the representation of crime, forty years after Genovese’s murder. Smart’s story is told through the perspective of crime’s secondary victims, that circle of family