Victims of crime with disabilities in Ireland

Abstract

In recent decades, criminal justice systems are, at least partially, being reconstructed as they demonstrate an increased sensitivity to the needs and concerns of victims of crime. As part of this, a new cultural theme of the victim as ‘Everyman’ is emerging. However, these generalizing tendencies conceal the multiplicity of experiences of victimhood and of interactions with the criminal justice system. As a result, certain categories of victim are rendered invisible and unable to share in the benefits of this more inclusive approach. One such category is victims with disabilities, and in particular those with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities. The purpose of this article is to write victims with disabilities in Ireland into the victim story more generally. Against a background of greater recognition of victims in Irish law and policy, it demonstrates the variety of ways in which victims with disabilities do not fit more orthodox, ‘everyman’, conceptions of victimization. It identifies the range of ways in which the outsider status of victims of crime with disabilities continues to be maintained in criminal justice policy, the adversarial process, the language employed by the criminal law, and service provision and identifies ways in which the failure to address the marginalization of victims with disabilities is a breach of international human rights obligations.