The Lens of Victim Contests and Youth Crime Stat Wars

Abstract

In this article I examine Canadian youth crime debates as a way to explore the connection between “victim contests” and “stat wars.” I address how constructing young offenders as either victims or victimizers generates “victim contests,” which in turn serve as interpretive anchoring points shaping how youth crime statistics are interpreted. The numbers themselves do not matter, as underlying assumptions about young offender identity and culpability become a lens through which numbers are understood. In this sense, victim contests generate “stat wars,” involving numbers that act to “make up people.” I also explore some broader implications of these connections, especially given the increasingly actuarial responses to youth crime in late‐modern Western society.

The Prospect of Invention in Rhetorical Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine

“…It turns out, though, that the realism of Burke's recalcitrance is of a different and more encompassing order than the narrow realist version McGuire and Melia assigned to the term (Prelli, Anderson, & Althouse, 2011). problems. Sociologists (Adorjan, 2011;Andreas & Greenhill, 2010;Best, 1990;Gusfield, 1981;Perrin & Miller-Perrin, 2011;Waidzunas, 2012) developed this area of study, but rhetoricians are well equipped to contribute studies of their own. For example, Best (2013)-a major leader and initiator of work in the area-followed Gusfield (1981) in discussing medical reframing of otherwise moral or political problems, as instanced by the phobia label ("homophobia," "Islamophobia"), to construct social problems in terms not warranted by formal psychiatric categorization and diagnosis.…”