Criminal policy processes often appear abstract and illusive, but sometimes a single criminal incident causes traceable policy impact. This article is about such an incident. A victim of a grave, violent assault published an opinion piece in a national newspaper, which sparked considerable public debate and policy actions. Some policy actions were new, and others had previously been proposed but repeatedly discarded. Based on an empirical study of the victim's opinion piece, the ensuing media debate, and subsequent policy actions, we explore why and how certain victim's stories capture their audience and strike a responsive chord in the public and in politicians. In the article, we analyze how the victim presents the incident as a narrative, and we identify the central features of the media debate and trace its visible impact on victim policies and legislation. We explore how some elements of the story are silenced in the political aftermath and how other elements serve as capital for politicians in pursuing their own agendas. A closer look at the policy changes in the wake of this opinion piece reveals that the story legitimizes certain political decisions and ignores victims' desire for structural changes. Our study adds to research of "political agenda setting" by investigating the narrative power of an individual case on policy-making and by exhibiting the complex interplay between an individual story, media attention, and policy-making.
This article explores how criminal justice actors interpret and process victims’ emotional expressions. On the basis of a qualitative study on the interactions between legal institutions and victims of violence in Denmark, the article demonstrates how police officers, prosecutors, victims’ counsel and judges each separately understand and evaluate victims’ emotional reactions. These actors interpret victims’ feelings according to their own professional roles and motivations so as to gain an overview of a case and the actions required of them in relation to it, resulting in quite different perceptions of victims’ needs and degree of trustworthiness. At the same time, professionals also interact across institutions by writing and exchanging case files, and in so doing police officers’ perceptions of victim reactions are often disclosed to both prosecutors and judges. This article contributes to existing knowledge of how different professional ideals specifically influence the handling of victims and their emotional needs, while the more general consensus on ‘appropriate emotions’ simultaneously generates knowledge across professions and institutional settings.
Developments within biotechnology are of a pace and complexity that challenge the predictability at the foundation of legislation, i.e. the possibility for politicians to foresee pitfalls and hazards, and design legislation accordingly. The lack of predictability is not only a challenge for the legislature, but also for the citizen, who is to consent to the new biotech services offered by the health authorities. How can one give informed consent to a measure, the consequences of which is hard to predict? Does the uncertainty and lack of predictability mean that paternalism has slipped back in as a ‘self-selected’ responsiveness to the rhetoric of the health regime? Recently, Denmark has taken another step in the direction of voiding autonomy of actual value by rendering genetic analysis contingent on agreeing that the resulting data may be stored in the recently established National Genome Centre, and reused for research unless the patient opts out.
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