Beyond victims’ rights: recognition, institutionalization and the construction of victimhood in contemporary criminal justice

The rise of the victim to a central role in contemporary criminal justice represents one of the most significant transformations in the ways in which crime is defined and governed in late modernity. Historically marginalised within a state-centred paradigm, in which crime was interpreted primarily as an offence against public authority, the victim has progressively acquired a new symbolic, legal and institutional centrality. This paper offers a critical review of the literature on the ‘victim turn’, drawing on contributions from victimology, the sociology of punishment, the theory of recognition and studies on restorative justice. Moving beyond an interpretation that views this transformation as a mere expansion of victims’ rights, the article analyses the processes through which the figure of the victim has been recognised, institutionalised and incorporated into the new rationalities of penal governance. The research identifies three complementary interpretative dimensions. The first concerns recognition, understood as the process through which suffering acquires moral and social significance; the second concerns institutionalisation, through which the experience of harm is translated into legal, administrative and organisational categories; the third concerns penal governance, highlighting the symbolic role of the victim in the construction of contemporary narratives on security and social control. The article argues that the contemporary victim constitutes an ambivalent figure: simultaneously a subject of recognition, an institutional category and a political resource. Understanding the 'victim turn’ therefore means analysing the broader broadertransformations in the relationship between suffering, justice and power in contemporary societies.