Victim Support and the Welfare State

International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justi

2020

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This article analyses human rights discourses and practices in Sweden's largest victim support and advocacy organisation-Victim Support Sweden. The study is based on the organisation's national archive and interviews with key representatives. The article shows that Victim Support Sweden has been consistent in what they say and do in relation to human rights. From start it has argued in line with the principles in Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), that all human beings are equal and it have not polarised victims and offenders. Later the organisation developed amore nuanced understanding of victimisation and focused on so-called "vulnerable victims;"one of the categories mentioned in Article 2 of UDHR. The results of this article contradict the assumption that victim support organisations are part of a conservative political agenda. This highlights the need to counter balance the domination of Anglophone literature in the field of victim support.

Section: Conclusion and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Victim Support Sweden In Its Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Victim Support Sweden In Its Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Saying or doing human rights? A study of victim support Sweden

Svensson

International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justi

2020

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An influential child of its time: Victim Support Sweden and the changing discourse on violence against women

Nordic Journal of Criminology

Svensson

2021

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This article aims to describe and analyse the policy work by Sweden's largest victim support organization -the Swedish Association for Victim Support (BOJ) -in the area of violence against women. The article is based on a study of BOJ's national archive and interviews with key figures in the organization. We analysed the material within the context of contemporary governing political ideas in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, particularly concerning violence against women. We argue that BOJ is both a creation and a creator of its time. BOJ gained a position in a changing welfare state and has adhered to contemporary governing ideas over time. At the same time, BOJ has helped silence structural discourses around violence against women in relation to both class and gender by supporting the notion that considered abused women to be crime victims, and not as women first and foremost. Going forward, it is essential to ask whether defining abused women principally as 'victims of crime' is helpful or harmful. If we adjust how violence against women is perceived, the solutions will change.

Crime Victims, Immigrants And Social Welfare: Creating The Racialized Other In Sweden

Branteryd

The British Journal of Criminology

Brown

et al. 2021

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This study explores the role of immigration and racialization in creating the first Swedish victim support centre in the early 1980s. The study is based on a qualitative content analysis of the archives of Victim Support Södertälje, the first lasting Swedish victim support centre, from 1983 to 1990. While many of the centre’s activities focused on crime prevention, it defined crime and victimization as the province of immigrant communities in Södertälje, and, notably, as outside—and aberrant from—the imagined racial community of Sweden. Thus, victim support centres were one of the mechanisms to continue to defend the ideals of the Swedish welfare state, but to do so in ways that prevented incursions within Swedish racial homogeneity from the outside.