Abstract
This chapter identifies four distinct yet overlapping types of victims hierarchies which reflect subjective beliefs about deserving victims in Northern Ireland, and articulates how their varying constructions and implications bear on peacebuilding and reconciliation processes. These include moral hierarchies, which privilege innocence and abstention from violence; hierarchies of attention which demonstrate how certain experiences of victimhood garner greater access to resources like investigative rigour and public influence; pragmatic hierarchies, which attempt to objectively assess and order the severity of individuals’ harm; and finally, intergroup hierarchies which exemplify the ethnocentric processes underpinning the victim-perpetrator paradigm. Intergroup hierarchies overlap significantly with other types, even appropriating the language of morality or severity of need to justify prioritising in-group members as the most deserving victims.
I remember sitting with four women who had all lost members of their family. […] One said, ‘tell me, what’s the greatest atrocity that’s ever happened?’ and I thought this is probably a trick question. And I says, ‘you’re expecting me to say Omagh, but I know there’s probably some trick in this’, and I says ‘right, let me see, let me see’, and foolishly I then said, ‘could it have been the Shankill bomb?’ to which one of them said, ‘which one?’ And they told me was it this one, this one, this one or this one? And this went on and on. So then I said, ‘what is it?’ And one of them looked to the other and said, ‘you tell him, Mary’. And Mary says it was such and such a date, my son was walking out of the church and two guys drove up on a motorbike and shot him dead. ‘And you tell him’, and the other one said no, it was actually such and such a date, when my son went here and this happened to him. And so, it reminded me of the expression that was familiar here, ‘your man has to die in a crowd before the world takes notice’, so in all of those things, we place an interpretation, but when you get those who have suffered most, they don’t have any real difference.
Personal interview 26
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
‘Castlereagh’ refers to an RUC station in East Belfast, and Special Branch was a section of the RUC that worked closely with British Intelligence during the conflict.
- 2.
Aidan McAnespie was shot in the back by a soldier whilst travelling through a British Army checkpoint. The soldier was charged with manslaughter but was not convicted at the time, though new charges were filed in 2018.
- 3.
For an in-depth analysis of narratives which frame republican disappearances, see Lauren Dempster, ‘The Republican Movement, “Disappearing” and framing the past in Northern Ireland’ International Journal of Transitional Justice 10 (2016): 250–271.
References
Bell, Christine. 2003. Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland. Fordham 26: 1095–1147.
Bouris, Erica. 2007. Complex Political Victims. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press Inc.
Brewer, John D. 2006. Memory, Truth and Victimhood in Post-Trauma Societies. In The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, ed. G. Delanty and K. Kumar, 214–224. London: SAGE.
———. 2010. Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brewer, John D., Bernadette C. Hayes, Katrin Dudgeon, Natascha Mueller-Hirth, Francis Teeney, and Shirley Lal Wijesinghe. 2014. Victims as Moral Beacons of Humanitarianism in Post-Conflict Societies. International Social Science Journal 65 (215–216): 37–47.
Christie, Nils. 1986. The Ideal Victim. In From Crime Policy to Victim Policy: Reorienting the Justice System, ed. Ezzat A. Fattah, 17–30. London: Macmillan Press.
Cory, Peter. 2004. Cory Collusion Inquiry Report: Rosemary Nelson. London: Stationery Office.
Crocker, David. 2003. Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework. In Dilemmas of Reconciliation: Cases and Concepts, ed. C. Prager and T. Govier, 39–63. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Fay, Marie Therese, Mike Morrissey, and Marie Smyth. 1998. Mapping Troubles-Related Deaths in Northern Ireland. Derry/Londonderry: INCORE.
Ferguson, Neil, Mark Burgess, and Ian Hollywood. 2010. Who Are the Victims? Victimhood Experiences in Postagreement Northern Ireland. Political Psychology 31 (6): 857–886.
Govier, Trudy. 2003. What Is Acknowledgment and Why Is It Important? In Dilemmas of Reconciliation: Cases and Concepts, ed. Carol A.L. Prager and Trudy Govier, 65–89. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Hegarty, Angela. 2002. The Government of Memory: Public Inquiries and the Limits of Justice in Northern Ireland. Fordham International Law Journal 26 (4): 1148.
Hogg, Michael A. 1996. Intragroup Processes, Group Structure and Social Identity. In Social Groups and Identities: Developing the Legacy of Henri Tajfel, ed. W. Peter Robinson, 65–93. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
———. 2001. Social Categorization, Depersonalization, and Group Behavior. In Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes, ed. Michael A. Hogg and R.S. Tinsdale, 56–85. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Hogg, Michael A., and Dominic Abrams. 1988. Social Identifications: A Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes. London: Routledge.
Huyse, Luc. 2003. Victims. In Reconciliation After Violent Conflict: A Handbook, ed. David Bloomfield, Teresa Barnes, and Luc Huyse, 53–66. Stockholm: Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
Jankowitz, Sarah. 2018. The ‘Hierarchy of Victims’ in Northern Ireland: A Framework for Critical Analysis. International Journal of Transitional Justice 12: 216–236.
Lawther, Cheryl. 2014a. The Construction and Politicisation of Victimhood. In Victims of Terrorism: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Study, ed. Orla Lynch and Jason Argomaniz, 10–30. London: Taylor & Francis.
———. 2014b. Truth, Denial and Transition: Northern Ireland and the Contested Past. Abingdon: Oxford University Press.
Levi, Primo. 1986. The Drowned and the Saved. London: Abacus.
McDowell, Sara. 2007. Who Are the Victims? Debates, Concepts and Contestation in ‘Post-Conflict’ Northern Ireland. CAIN: Conflict Archive on the Internet.
McEvoy, Kieran, and Kirsten McConnachie. 2012. Victimology in Transitional Justice: Victims, Innocence and Hierarchy. European Journal of Criminology 9: 527–538.
Miron, Anca M., and Nyla R. Branscombe. 2008. Social Categorization, Standards of Justice, and Collective Guilt. In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Reconciliation, ed. Arie Nadler, Thomas E. Malloy, and J.D. Fisher, 77–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murray, Douglas. 2011. Bloody Sunday: Truth, Lies and the Saville Inquiry. London: Biteback Publishing.
Noor, Masi, Nurit Shnabel, Samer Halabi, and Arie Nadler. 2012. When Suffering Begets Suffering. Personality and Social Psychology Review 16 (4): 351–374.
Prager, Carol A.L. 2003. Aspects of Understanding and Judging Mass Human Rights Abuses. In Dilemmas of Reconciliation: Cases and Concepts, ed. Carol A.L. Prager and Trudy Govier, 197–219. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Riek, Blake M., Samuel L. Gaertner, John F. Dovidio, Marilynn B. Brewer, Eric W. Mania, and Marika J. Lamoreaux. 2008. A Social-Psychological Approach to Postconflict Reconciliation. In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Reconciliation, ed. Arie Nadler, Thomas E. Malloy, and Jeffrey D. Fisher, 255–273. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rolston, Bill. 2001. Killings by the State. In Future Policies for the Past, Report No. 13, 45–51. Belfast: Democratic Dialogue.
Selimovic, Johanna Mannergren. 2010. Perpetrators and Victims: Local Responses to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 57: 50–61.
Smyth, Marie. 2003. Putting the Past in Its Place: Issues of Victimhood and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland’s Peace Process. In Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict, ed. Nigel Biggar, 125–153. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
———. 2004. Remembering in Northern Ireland: Victims, Perpetrators and Hierarchies of Pain and Responsibility. In Past Imperfect: Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland and Societies in Transition, ed. Brandon Hamber, 31–49. Derry/Londonderry: INCORE.
Templer, Sara, and Katy Radford. 2008. Hearing the Voice: Sharing Perspectives in the Victim/Survivor Sector. Belfast: Community Relations Council.
UK House of Parliament. 2006. No. 2953 (N.I.17). Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jankowitz, S.E. (2018). Hierarchies of Victims. In: The Order of Victimhood. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98328-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98328-8_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98327-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98328-8
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)