Victims of Environmental Harms and Their Role in National and International Justice

Abstract

Over the last two decades, increasing attention has been paid by criminologists to the natural environment and to criminal activities that lead to environmental degradation (White, 2008). Researchers in the field that has been variably labelled ‘conservation criminology’ (Gibbs et al., 2010), ‘eco-critical criminology’ (Lynch and Stretesky, 2007), and, more recently, ‘green criminology’ (Ruggiero and South, 2010) have made steady progress towards the application of criminological theories of offending and crime prevention to such activities. From a critical perspective, criminology has also cast light on the power imbalances inherent in the labelling of certain polluting activities as ‘criminal’, which of course is tied up with the economic goals of corporate actors and indeed of states as a whole (Pepper, 1993). Throughout this development, however, green criminology has repeated the omission only now being fully recognised within mainstream criminology: excluding victims of crime from such academic discourse. Over the last 40 years, the sub-discipline of victimology has gathered pace and to some extent has addressed this shortfall in relation to more ‘traditional’ notions of victimisation (property crime, crimes of violence, domestic violence, and so on). However, there is at present an almost complete absence of victimological work focusing on those affected by environmental crime, or indeed focusing on the wider concept of environmental harm.