Victims and Offenders

This chapter assesses the role of victims and offenders in criminal cases. The victim is invisible in the definition of crime but omnipresent in the prosecution and sentencing of offenders. In the international legal order, in particular, the victim is front and center, both in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and in lawsuits under the Alien Torts Claim Act. Crime is typically defined by the actions of the offender, and the victim is an incidental consequence. There are many victimless crimes, such as those in the sexual and reproductive arena, which in the United States at least are no longer subject to prosecution on constitutional grounds. The argument for decriminalization is the privacy of the offender, but privacy of the victim can, paradoxically, become an argument for criminalization under the right to a private life codified in the European Convention on Human Rights. The chapter also looks at the duality of victimhood.