Book Review: Rock, P. (2004). Constructing Victims' Rights: The Home Office, New Labour, and Victims. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 581

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567707310578
• Author: Bernadette T. Muscat
• Published date: 01 December 2007
• Date: 01 December 2007
• Subject Matter: Articles

dissention, or vagabondage so it should not come as a surprise that ASB likewise is too fluid and

imprecise for measurement of questions like: Are people behaving worse than in the last century?

“Harlots” and “witches” have morphed into “nasty neighbors” in the 21st century. Elizabethan Poor

Laws, the Town Police Clauses of 1847, and the 1823 Vagrancy Act foreshadowed the ASB Act of 2003.

Chapter 4 is one of the most successful chapters because it turns the first three on their heads.

Rather than blame the victims and individualism, Burney takes a sociological perspective in which the

villains are not crime and incivilities; these are seen rather as symptoms of growing social, educa-

tional, and income inequities. Unemployment is seen not as individual caused but structural changes—

closed coalfields, deindustrialization, shrinking housing markets, closures of mental hospitals, and

so on. Elders blame youth as major ASB offenders, yet children and young people are actually far

more likely to be the victims of crime than their elder blamers. The rise of consumer culture stimulates

desires that cannot be legitimately fulfilled. The peer group has far more influence by one’s teen

years than one’s parents, yet the ASB Act targets parents. The neighborhood street becomes a contested

area in which the elderly feel menaced by their own sense of loss of power.

The documentation of the breeching of English common law principles and the right to a fair trial

embodied in the European Convention are the subject of chapter 5. Most telling is Burney’s com-

parisons of the grossly uneven enforcement of the ASB Orders among the 42 police districts. Burney

documents the expanding web of control and surveillance that violates basic rights to liberty, respect

for family life, freedom of assembly, and UN Conventions on the Rights of Children. She also shows

how it is ultimately women who suffer from their children’s bad behavior.

Although government has taken on the responsibility of controlling bad behavior, chapter 6

suggests that landlords end up being chief enforcers through housing laws. The problem is that crime

and disorder are worse where communities have been destabilized by job and population losses. The

heavy hand of government ignores alternatives such as mediation, conflict resolution, and restorative

justice.

The least informative chapter is regrettably chapter 7. Burney claims to give a comparative context

through interviews with authorities in Sweden and the Netherlands. However, I suspect her interviews

were conveniently conducted among authorities who spoke English. This chapter has none of the

richness of earlier chapters, which cited actual social scientific evaluations and authoritative critics.

I had no idea that Americans have been in the vanguard for the internationalization of a bad idea

whose time has come. Our shopping malls—which lust after the enormous purchasing power of

teens—insist that teens must now be accompanied by a parent after curfews because of the unruly

behaviors of a minority. Missouri is one of only five states with ticket scalping laws, yet the St. Louis

Cardinals resell tickets online at scalping rates, and several city police face disciplinary action for

using scalper’s tickets for the 2006 World Series. Other readers will find similar comparative utility

in Burney’s book.

Herman W. Smith

University of Missouri, St. Louis

Rock, P. (2004). Constructing Victims’Rights: The Home Office, New Labour, and Victims.

New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 581.

DOI: 10.1177/1057567707310578

Constructing Victims’Rights: The Home Office, New Labour, and Victims provides a comprehensive

dissection of the development, implementation, and historical context of victims’ rights, policies,

and programs in England. The historical backdrop begins in the mid-1990s and continues for almost

362 International Criminal Justice Review