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Publication date: 17 November 2021

Sophie Yarker

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Creating Spaces for an Ageing Society
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-739-6

Book part
Publication date: 7 October 2019

This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of an English medium-security prison housing men convicted of sex offences. It argues that victims haunted (Gordon, 2008) both the…

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This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of an English medium-security prison housing men convicted of sex offences. It argues that victims haunted (Gordon, 2008) both the prison and the narratives of the men it held: they were ever-present in discourse, but depersonalised and lacking in agency. How prisoners described their victims said a great deal about how they sought to portray themselves, and the chapter makes this point by outlining three basic ‘types’ of story. In the first, the prisoner knew the victim well and deliberately sought to remember their suffering; at the same time, they themselves hoped not to be defined by their status as an offender. In the second, the victim was largely missing from the narrative, either because the prisoners barely remembered them or because the prisoners did not really consider them to be a victim. In the third type of story, the prisoners considered themselves to be the real victim, and considered the official victim as well as the criminal justice system to be responsible for their suffering. The chapter concludes by arguing victims were ghosts because the prison only allowed them to appear in certain ways. It suggests that narrative criminologists consider the relationship between narratives and justice, and that one way of doing this is to think about what stories don't communicate as well as what they do.

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The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-006-6

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