Victims and the Significance of Causing Harm (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Cambridge World History of Violence
The Cambridge World History of Violence, 2020
Sexual and Family Violence in Europe d i a n n e h a l l a n d e l i z a b e t h m a l c o l m Any study of sexual and family violence in early modern Europe must first acknowledge and confront the problems of language and meaning. Modern terminology can obscure rather than illuminate past understandings of violence. Widely used current terms like 'domestic violence', 'rape' and 'infanticide' are not easily transferrable across time. Definitions of domestic violence in Europe today prioritise heterosexual couples and usually refer to violence by men against female partners in the home, although they can include violence perpetrated by women against male partners. But this concept of domestic violence simply did not exist within early modern Europe's legal frameworks. Rape and infanticide, on the other hand, were certainly crimes according to early modern European legal codes, but how contemporaries understood them is markedly different from how they are understood today. And even today, while sexual violence has specific legal definitions, these definitions vary according to jurisdiction. Under modern German law, for example, the term 'rape' covers both male and female victims and does not necessarily assume sexual penetration, whereas, under Swiss law, it is defined specifically as forced sexual penetration of a woman. 1 How, then, do we investigate and analyse forms of violence in the past that were by their very nature often hidden or lacked witnesses? Analysis of criminal laws, court cases and trial outcomes is vital to any investigation of the boundaries of historical sexual and family violence. Criminal prosecutions and convictions can also be quantified and very usefully compared over time and between different territories. Historians have done this most productively with murdera crime that leaves a corpse and as such is hard to hide. But justice in the past, as still today, was always inflected by class and by gender. Barriers to litigation based on such factors need therefore to be
Critical Times, 2019
This article offers a reading of the concluding paragraph of Walter Benjamin's “Toward the Critique of Violence.” It discusses Benjamin's assertion that only a philosophical-historical approach can provide the key to a critique of violence in light of his essay's discussion of legal violence, and in light of his discovery of radically different types of violence. Benjamin argues that the legal order remains enclosed in a cycle of law-positing and law-preserving violence. Moreover, the legal order inherits the essential trait of myth and of mythic violence: ambiguity. This article shows that guilt is the destiny of those subjected to mythic (and legal) forms of violence. The fateful cycle of legal violence can be undone only by the irruption of an absolutely heterogeneous type of violence, which Benjamin calls divine violence. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that, in deposing legal violence (and the legal order as a whole), divine violence also deposes itself as viol...
Accounting for killing: Accountability for death
Accounting History, 2012
Accounting and the conscious secretive killing of humans are rarely concurrently examined in the contemporary and historical literature. Based on examinations of a rare and formerly highly secretive surviving written record found in the Venice State Archive, and other surviving primary records, as well as secondary sources, this novel study outlines evidence of “accounting for killing” of the enemies of the Venetian State during the sixteenth century as a means of rendering the individuals who made those decisions “accountable for death”. The rationale for this governmental approach to self-preservation, described as “Reason of State”, was widely adopted in Europe during this period. The available evidence illustrates the use of the police apparatus in the Venetian State, namely the Council of Ten, in order to reinforce, protect and defend the State, and illuminates the role of accounting information in this highly secretive and sinister process. The notion of “secretive collective ...
Violence and various forms of violent behaviors happen among peoples who are not known each other, but also happen among peoples those who are known each other. This is especially applies on friends, but also on family members. Unfortunately, the consequences may be tragic because some of these forms of violence end up with the murder. This paper considering the phenomenology of homicide from criminal and forensic aspects and wants to point out to a very responsible task that has police officers and other criminalistic/forensic professionals who try to solve serious criminal acts like this.
The Victim in Historical Perspective: Some Aspects of the English Experience
Journal of Social Issues, 1984
This paper attempts to place the relationship between the victim, the harmdoer, and the state in historical perspective by concentrating on a formative period in English law-the 11th through the 13th centuries. Major focus is on the transition from one system, in which victims were seen as deserving of compensation, to a very different system, in which compensation was gradually supplanted by the support of the state. Two related themes-the emerging distinction between crime and tort, and the state's attempts to monopolize the prosecution of serious offenses-are also treated. The paper concludes that, while victims eventually lost the right to compensation, they gained the valuable advantage of being represented by the might and power of the state, a development that relieved them of the heavy burdens that were inherent in the compensatory system of justice.