Evolving victimhood: The idealization of non-ideal victims

Introduction

Victimologists are familiar with the concept of the ‘ideal victim’, characterized by Nils Christie (1986) as ‘a sort of public status of the same type and level of abstraction as that, for example, of a “hero” or a “traitor”’. Christie identified six key characteristics that informed the socially constructed ‘ideal victim’ which involved: being weak in relation to the offender (e.g. female, sick, very young or very old); virtuous or engaged in legitimate activities; blameless for the occurrence; unrelated to the offender; opposite to the offender (perceived as ‘big and bad’); and able to elicit sympathy through the attained victim status. This entails a constructivist perspective, according to which the term ‘victim’ is conceived as a social status that is ascribed to a person according to formal and informal rules (Strobl, 2004).

Christie’s approach can be understood as, to some extent, a reaction against earlier victimological theorisations that tended to emphasize victim precipitation or victim contribution to crime (Amir, 1967; Von Hentig, 1948), which were rejected for reinforcing rape myths and victim-blaming explanations. However, several aspects of Christie’s move towards a constructivist or critical victimology have also been subject to criticism, notably the oversimplification of the processes through which victim status is recognized and the failure to adequately consider how factors like media framing, race, social conditions, and gender shape public sympathy and the legitimation of victimhood (Lam et al., 2024; Long, 2021; Taylor, 2022).

The concept of the ideal victim has been widely adopted and disseminated. Subsequent scholarship has often distilled the initial description of the ‘ideal victim’ into three central requirements for a human being harmed by a crime in order to be recognized by society: vulnerability, innocence, and suffering (Van Dijk, 2009; Walklate, 2007).

However, the development of the idealization process has scarcely been researched in the context of social dynamics characterized by the evolution of cultural and political conflicts or moral ambivalences. This is the objective of this study. We will start with a review of the foundations of the need for idealization, then we will address the main areas in which the idealization process occurs and its consequences for real victims. Finally, we will look at cases of idealization of non-ideal victims, including a specific case study centred on a series of murders of women involved in paid sex sentenced by a Spanish criminal court.

The need for idealization

When we ask ourselves about the roots of the need for idealization, we realize that this is something deeply rooted in human socialization. Idealization is, in general terms, favoured by the need to reduce complexity, as happens with heuristics and cultural phenomenology related to the construction of mythologies, archetypes, or the idealization of the past. This manifests in nostalgic retrospection, based on ideas like the Golden Age or the noble savage.

Beyond this general background, victim idealization is related to the problem of how to deal with victimization. Victimization is a threat for society because it challenges the belief in a just world. This belief, according to Lerner’s (1980) theory, provides individuals with a useful resource for coping with the fear of victimization. By denying victim status to those who do not have the characteristics of expected victims, the risk of experiencing victimization is prevented as long as they can believe that they behave in the right way. Social representation has an impact on how victims present themselves, their self-perceptions, and their wish to be perceived or not as victims (Jägervi, 2014).

However, this is not the only mechanism that we need to consider. Idealization can be also, and primarily, related to the ideals of the purity and value of the victim as sacrificial object. According to the thesis sustained by Girard (1977), the victim is the basis of the experience of the sacred. ¹ Through an anthropological analysis of violence and sacrifice, the author stated that the function of sacrifice is ‘to quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupting’, which specifically requires the prevention of revenge as an intolerable menace. As Girard highlighted, ‘the more critical the situation the more “precious” the victim must be’. In this context, the sacrificial lamb has been prized as the gentlest and most innocent of creatures, and in some ancient civilizations children have also been considered valuable victims for sacrifice.

Not far from this anthropological approach, Van Dijk’s (2009) contribution regarding the conception of victimhood in the western cultural context must be considered. This author argues that the social recognition of a victim is conditioned on their fulfilling expectations of being sacrificed for the benefit of the community, and in this context such a conception is rooted in the idea of the expiatory victim, represented by the Passion of Christ (Agnus Dei), the Son of God who through his sacrifice redeemed humanity.

At the frontiers of victimological research and beyond, some theoretical constructions have been developed that can provide new insights into the subject. The concept of ‘disenfranchised grief’, coined by Doka (1999) refers to grief that is not socially acknowledged. It describes situations where someone’s right to grieve is unrecognized due to social norms, cultural taboo, or power dynamics. Examples would be when the death of a secret lover occurs, or an individual in a stigmatized relationship, or someone not perceived as important. We can find some victimological offshoots of the concept in the literature.

A first example can be found in the study carried out by Baker et al. (2019) in the USA, who, after interviewing bereaved families of 43 citizens who died after police contact, qualified their experiences as being ‘co-victims’ of homicide. Based on the concept of disenfranchised grief, they evaluated how social norms affect the grieving process, arguing that those individuals are often unable to grieve in a way that is socially legitimized. The study found a racial dimension in this process, as non-White families were especially affected by this experience of victimization. Second, this concept has been used by Dwyer and Miller (1996) with regard to the experiences of young women who had been victims of incest. The authors examined the nature of their grief and the complex relationships within their families, looking at the clinical implications of their experiences and their losses.

A different approach that nevertheless converges with the previous one at a theoretical level is the concept of grievability suggested by Butler (2009), examining how media, governments and cultural narratives frame certain lives as valuable, and therefore worthy of protection or mourning, while others are implicitly excluded. The author is focused on how power and recognition work at the social level and public discourse, questioning the mechanisms that treat only some deaths as public losses. Butler places the issue beyond the individual dimension of grief and warns that it cannot be privatized and depoliticized, outlining the transformative effect of loss. She argues that grief ‘furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility’. That is why a hierarchy of grief becomes something inevitable. She further delves into the idea of de-realization: ‘If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated’. Butler’s exploration of the concept of de-realization makes visible the other side of idealization and provides insight to understanding its consequences on the victims.

The idealization of the victim

On this basis, the reasons why society attributes victimhood, and, therefore, constructs and hierarchizes victims, can be easily understood. This process has been observed in various dimensions; the political being one of the most important. Claims to victimhood involve, beyond attitudes of resentment, moral and political choices about what should be recognized as injustice and about what kind of injustices must first be considered. A literature review is structured to progressively unpack the process of idealization and to demonstrate its empirical relevance and practical consequences. The concept of idealized victimhood is examined across different contexts. It begins with victimological contributions that have delved into the complexities of victimhood attribution in different domains. It then focuses the analysis on political victimhood, where idealization is most explicitly linked to moral authority, collective identity, and legal recognition. In addition, the review extends the analysis to interpersonal and structural violence, highlighting how stereotypes of innocence, vulnerability, and moral purity shape hierarchies of empathy in cases such as intimate partner violence, sexual offences, and LGBTIQ+ victimization. Finally, the review addresses both the consequences of idealization and the processes through which non-ideal victims may become retrospectively or symbolically idealized. This structure provides the conceptual foundation for the analysis of the case study discussed in the final section of the manuscript.

How idealized victimhood impacts real victims

To continue on the same topic, four different statuses can be identified, all resulting from the confrontation between self-perception and socially attributed victimhood. Strobl (2010) systematically divides these into four types: (1) actual victim (recognized by themselves and others as a victim); (2) non-victim (someone not regarded as a victim by themselves or others); (3) rejected victim (perceived as a victim by themselves, but not by others); and (4) designated victim (viewed as a victim by others, but not by themselves).

The social construction of victimhood based on the ideal victim model, producing situations of denied victimhood (rejected victims or non-victims), has negative consequences for victims. Those who do not fit the defined pattern face barriers that hinder recognition of victimization by authorities and professionals, which can discourage reporting and seeking support (Lowmann, 2000; Struyf, 2023). This in turn can lead to less engagement from the criminal justice system in the investigation, evidence gathering, and prosecution of the crime. In addition, it masks inequalities by only channelling empathy towards those who conform to normalized moral narratives and may also pressure victims or their families to conform to an idealized image. Secondary victimization is a consequence of this social process, which can be reflected in the way victims are treated within the criminal justice system or in the reactions from the media and, especially, on social networks (Sprankle et al., 2018).

When, as result of denied victimhood, a person is not regarded as a victim in the social world, emotional support from the family and social network is not obtained, and material support from compensation schemes can be rejected. Involvement in illegal activities also makes a successful claim for victim status very difficult, as Strobl (2004) has highlighted with regard to German victim compensation law, which is similar to Spanish law (Law 35/1995). Strobl has added two characteristics to the ‘ideal victim’ model: he or she must not behave provocatively towards the offender and must cooperate perfectly with the police and the courts. The latter requirement also had a legal obligation in Spain, where the law required victims to report the events as a condition for accessing support services. This restriction has disappeared as a consequence of the transposition of the European Directive 2012/29 establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime.

The problems raised here are visible above all in crimes affected by a starker social scrutiny based on moral beliefs or with an emotional and political background, such as sex crimes. The victim’s behaviour before the incident, whether that may be having consumed alcohol or drugs, a prior relationship with the perpetrator or their way of dressing, are arguments that may distance the victim from the social representation of what a real victim should be, so those who deviate from those norms or from the ‘rape myths’ are not believed or are blamed (Laugerud and Skilbrei, 2024). Nonetheless, the denial of victimhood has also been observed in other crime typologies, regarding victims that are stigmatized, such as women involved in paid sex, who, despite being at high risk of experiencing violence and even homicide, fall outside the societal construction (Sprankle et al., 2018).

Impact for denied victims has been observed in cases of men affected by sexual violence or intimate partner violence. Male victims can have unique consequences as denial of social services, blame for victimization, and even hostility and abuse from members of their social networks (Ambrozewicz et al., 2024). As Eckstein (2010) has revealed by interviewing those victims, alienation, denigration, and limitation of resources are cultural patterns for men who fail to uphold traditionally masculine identities.

How non-ideal victims can be idealized

The archetypal representation of an ideal victim primarily rests on someone whose intrinsic features align with the portrayal of the ‘little old lady’ described in Christie’s (1986) seminal work. Children, weak and defenceless individuals, and young White women, are variations of this representation, according to the type of crime and its circumstances. However, another manifestation of the ideal victim is when someone lacking these predefined victim characteristics, even possessing typical features of a denied victim, is nonetheless elevated to a status of purity. Victims of certain events, crimes, or tragedies can reach this moral or symbolic purity, leading to an idealized portrayal. This process is shaped by cultural and psychological factors. Through such dynamics, societies evolving in contexts of conflict and transformation rally around a unifying narrative as idealized victims represent societal ideals of purity, bravery, or resilience, and their stories may be tuned to reinforce existing moral frameworks or inspire collective empathy and action.

The idealization process can follow different patterns. Societies with strong collective traumas often idealize victims to provide symbols of unity or to galvanize support for national politics. Historical injustices may also lead to retrospective idealization, where victims of past atrocities are seen as martyrs or saints. However, in societies impacted by cultural discord or fragmented narratives, idealization can be channelled and exploited by political or social movements to advance specific agendas and reinforce their positions.

The redeeming mother: a brief case study

Some well-known cases have been examined in the criminological literature where victims or their families garnered major public sympathy and political engagement after parents’ active media engagement. In England, Madeleine McCann’s case, media framing and parents’ involvement worked together with the portrayal of the child victim with a photogenic appeal (Greer and McLaughlin, 2012). It is also worth noting the case of Sara Payne, an 8-year-old murdered child whose mother successfully campaigned for legal change (the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, known as Sarah’s Law). In this case, the mother’s respectable social identity and emotive campaigning helped mobilize political action (Zgoba and Cowan, 2020). It is important to highlight that this case likewise involved a minor victim.

A slightly different case is that of June, one of the founders of the charity Mothers against Violence, who lost her son to gun violence and subsequently emerged as the public figurehead for the group. The victim was a Black teenager, whose mother played a role as a charismatic matriarch, generating a public sense of emotional proximity to suffering. As Cook (2020) noted, ‘motherhood represents an effective platform for engaging other audiences beyond private grief and to those in the public sphere’.

As a case study marked by some relevant variations in relation to the preceding examples, a judicial process has been selected in which a man was tried and convicted for a series of crimes he committed in Valencia (Spain) between 2018 and 2019. In all of them, after contacting women who advertised sex for payment with a ‘white party’ (cocaine use), he introduced a large quantity of this substance into their bodies, which caused the death of three of them. He ultimately received 10 convictions. After a final sentence dictated by the Spanish Supreme Court, he was convicted of three murders and six attempted murders. In all 10 cases, the court also convicted him of an offence against sexual freedom. In the first ruling on the case, the Court stated that the defendant’s interest and objective in his encounters with these women was ‘a lethal sexual practice through a ritual of intoxication by introducing cocaine into their bodies vaginally or anally, while they were unsuspecting, sometimes without their knowledge and other times despite their explicit refusal’.

During the case, various failures and negligent behaviours occurred: the flawed performance of the autopsy on the first fatal victim, which prevented the cause of death from being determined; the lack of response by some police officers; and the victims’ failure to report the crimes. These circumstances, linked to the stigmatization suffered by women engaged in sex work and their distance from the image of the ideal victim, favoured the perpetrator’s ability to continue committing crimes against new victims.

However, something different occurred with the last victim. The perpetrator took her to his home where she died as a result of cocaine intoxication which had been introduced into her body through her genitals. Afterwards, the convicted man disposed of the body, making it impossible to carry out any toxicological analysis, though the court proved that the substance introduced into her body was either of very high purity and/or was administered in a quantity far exceeding the amounts tolerable to the human body in recreational use of this drug. The victim’s mother, who had been informed by her daughter of the address she was going to, became worried when she received no news from her and went to the location, later informing the police of the young woman’s disappearance.

The victim’s mother undertook actions aimed at locating the young woman and, once the unfortunate outcome became known, at obtaining justice. The mother received increasing attention from the media, which prompted other victims to come forward and report the offender. It is worth mentioning the prominence gained by the mother through her media appearances. As a consequence of her activism, an association was created, which has promoted a popular legislative initiative entitled Platform for Marta Calvo Burón: Where Are My Rights? This initiative focused on a proposal to amend the Penal Code to classify the crime of concealment of a corpse and to apply the sentence of permanent imprisonment in cases of homicide followed by this circumstance.

In the first judgement, issued on 1 September 2022 by the Provincial Court of Valencia, the defendant was convicted of three counts of murder (in ideal concurrence with three offences of sexual assault), and sentenced to three prison terms of 22 years 10 months. He was also convicted of six counts of attempted murder (in ideal concurrence with six offences of sexual abuse), and sentenced to six prison terms of 14 years, in addition to sexual abuse and drug trafficking. A second judgement on appeal, dated 6 March 2023 increased the compensation for moral damages awarded to the parents of the last victim. In the final judgement (number 776/2024) of 18 September 2024, the Spanish Supreme Court upheld the appeal filed by the private prosecution, imposed three sentences of reviewable permanent imprisonment on the defendant instead of fixed-term sentences, and established a further increase in the compensation mentioned.

After the final sentence by the Supreme Court had been handed down, the media coverage of the news could be examined. The information was collected from digital media sources in which news of the judgement appeared, using the Google search engine. ² Among the 20 outlets included are the eight with the highest number of daily readers, according to the General Media Study report (excluding the sports press).

Most media outlets featured headlines emphasizing that the Supreme Court imposes a revisable permanent prison sentence on Marta Calvo’s murderer, with minor variations (El País, La Vanguardia, El Periódico, La Voz de Galicia, Europa Press, El Confidencial, El Correo, Las Provincias, and El Español). Other outlets provided additional context, as illustrated in the following excerpts:

The Supreme Court has spoken: permanent imprisonment for Marta Calvo’s serial killer. For the past three years, she has led a platform named after her daughter, whose purpose is to demand ‘from politicians, all of them’ that a new provision be added to the law allowing the maximum Spanish penalty, revisable permanent imprisonment, for those who, once their victim has been murdered, conceal the body and refuse to reveal its whereabouts over a sustained period of time. (Levante)

The Supreme Court has sentenced . . . to revisable permanent imprisonment for the death of Marta Calvo, and has raised the civil compensation to her parents to €140,000 for their daughter’s murder. It also confirms a prison sentence of 137 years for the deaths of two other women and the attempted murder of six others during sexual encounters involving cocaine use. (20 Minutos)

Some headlines refer to two other women who were murdered, without providing their names:

The Supreme Court imposes permanent imprisonment on Marta Calvo’s murderer and two other women. (ABC and Publico)

The Supreme Court imposes revisable permanent imprisonment on Marta Calvo’s murderer and two other women with whom he had sexual relations. (El Mundo)

As an exception, two outlets mentioned the names of all three victims:

The Supreme Court imposes permanent imprisonment on the murderer of Marta Calvo, Arliene, and Lady Marcela. (El Diario and ARA)

By means of a thematic analysis of the headlines and news stories published, five basic patterns have been identified: (a) the information focused on the most recent fatal victim; (b) mentions of her engagement in sex work were omitted; (c) the figure of the victim’s mother acquired a prominent role; (d) special attention was paid to the sentence imposed on the perpetrator; and (e) the absence of complaints regarding the previous cases, or the inadequate response they received from institutions, was not mentioned.

The news coverage of the Supreme Court ruling, which does not differ substantially from the coverage given to the two previous rulings, is the result of a series of circumstances and events that occurred following the information released about the disappearance of the tenth victim. These events triggered an emotional connection with the victim on the part of the media. The intervention of the mother is a powerful catalyst in the process of victim idealization. Once the daughter disappeared, the public image of the victim shifted towards the mother. Her suffering from not knowing her daughter’s whereabouts and her fight to achieve criminal law reform and a harsher sentence for the murderer became the focus of media attention. In this shift, the aspects that could cloud the purity of the ideal victim’s image, such as those related to sex work, cocaine use, or information about the perpetrator’s previous victims, are pushed aside or even silenced, as a necessary element in the process of victim idealization.

The mother embodies pain, loss, and respectability; key components of the ideal victim. Victimhood is transferred via relational proximity to someone who is socially accepted as a legitimate sufferer and the daughter’s victimhood is indirectly validated through the suffering of the mother (Cook, 2020). A similar mechanism has been detected in battered women, when they feel more likely to be seen as legitimate victims if they are also portrayed as loving, protective mothers. This frames their perceived victimhood in terms of their failure to protect, or their sacrifice for their children, rather than focusing on their own suffering. Their victim status is reinforced when it aligns with traditional gender roles and ideals, such as self-sacrificed motherhood. Jarnkvist and Brännström (2019) found this dominant narrative within a group of women victims of intimate partner violence in Sweden, who positioned themselves in line with the story of the caring mother in order to vindicate their victim status according to the prevalent discourse of motherhood in society. In the case under study here, the traditional role of the housewife and mother, as Strobl (2004) indicated, clearly facilitates the presentation of the victims as weak and helpless.

In observing this process, the archetype of the redeeming mother, whose love is stronger than her children’s sins, deeply rooted in cultural tradition, cannot be overlooked. Salvation through a woman’s love is a major romantic myth, but preceding this myth is something even more culturally ingrained in countries with a Catholic tradition: the figure of the mother, iconically represented by the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, advocate for sinners, and redeemer of her children’s sins. Embodied in the figure of the suffering and protective mother, the victim can meet the expectations of purity inherent to sacrifice and thus be socially recognized as fully deserving of compassion and support.

The rulings themselves reflect this process of victim idealization. The first judgement of the case noted, referring to the most recent fatal victim: ‘This time, she was not alone. She was not marginal: she had behind her a mother who broke the impunity sought and achieved until then by (the defendant)’.

As Girard (1977) warned, violence is the foundation of the experience of the sacred, and society, through sacrifice, diverts the violence that could affect those it wishes to protect towards a ‘sacrificable victim’. For this reason, victimology must concern itself with the observation and study of the processes through which society recognizes legitimate victims and channels the emotions of horror and compassion, today transmuted into the concepts of empathy and solidarity with victims.

The case has also made it possible to observe how the social mechanisms through which victimhood is constructed and represented feed back into the dynamics of stigmatization, discrimination, and the internalization of these by individuals within this group. The interpretation of the evolution of the case through three judicial instances and the reaction of the media cannot be approached without considering the paradoxes and ambiguities of the social process in which idealization is embedded. The idealized victim obtained sympathy because the mother of the victim was recognized as socially respectable, thus consolidating that the concept of ideal victim is still a valid frame to understand social dynamics and even courts’ decisions. Beyond this, it is unclear to what extent the rulings issued in this case may reflect an evolution in social sensitivity. Consciousness of the high risk of victimization faced by those who offer paid sex and overcoming the old conception that a prostitute could not be a victim of rape – an offence legally defined by the Spanish Penal Code as a crime against honesty up to 1989 – could be the manifestations of such evolution. Of course, this trend can coexist with attitudes of certain officials and professionals still anchored in the old conception that can contribute to perpetuate stigmatization and victimization.

Conclusion and implications for practice and research

Both the review carried out and the case examined have shown how the construction of victimhood can be perceived as an evolving process by which social groups adopt, modify, or amplify the understanding of victims of crime over time. The processes of victim idealization are a part of the evolution of social dynamics, and certain events and the intervention of specific actors influence this evolution. Future research should analyse how these processes occur in different social contexts and how they shape court decisions. For professional practice, the experience of shortcomings in the dealing of cases involving victims who diverge from the ideal model of victimhood can help identify areas requiring improvement and ensure progress in the effective and equal treatment of crime victims.