The ‘Ideal’ Victim of International Criminal Law

The role of victims is increasingly central to discussions in and practices of international criminal law. Greater attention is, I argue, leading to a visual and discursive specification of victimhood. Drawing on criminologist Nils Christie’s theorizing of victimhood, and identifying practices inside and outside the international criminal law courtroom, I discuss the social, political, and legal construction of an ‘ideal’ victim. The features of an ‘ideal’ victim of international crime are identified as being: (a) weakness and vulnerability, (b) dependency and (c) grotesqueness. The features coalesce into a feminized, infantilized, and racialized stereotype of victimhood. I argue that this problematic construction of the ‘ideal' victim is to be contextualized within the ‘attention economy’. The ‘attention economy’ views attention as a finite and highly in-demand resource which rewards the extreme and spectacular at the expense of the moderate and considered.