The wrong suffered by the victim is downgraded from a criminal matter to damage and to an issue of civil law and an ancillary matter of criminal justice. The victim is, in a sense, a party to the civil law proceedings that are conducted simultaneously in the same court room and within the wider framework of criminal proceedings. As a result, the glass is both half full and half empty. While the victim, on the one hand, is tolerated in a criminal court and allowed to actively participate in criminal proceedings and authentically voice her concerns, she acts, on the other hand, only in a supporting role.

In light of the following, another observation is appropriate at this point. Supporting the view that the victim is entitled to the conviction—and in some instances even to the punishment—of the offender does not necessarily imply that the victim should be burdened with the procedural task of charging the offender. A 22 1 Criminal Justice in Need of a Paradigm Shift right of the victim to the conviction of the offender neither implicates that prosecuting the offender is exclusively of concern to the victim, nor that the victim’s right to justice is her private matter and of no interest to her legal community.

I didn’t like that bullshit – this happened to me. It didn’t happen to the [. ] Queen! I was always a bit pissed off about that. 3 Conceptualising the Victim 11 The understanding that criminal justice protects, not the rights of individuals, but abstract goods, public interests, Rechtsg€ uter, has two fundamental consequences. Firstly, the individual victim of flesh and blood is reduced to the role of one potential witness among others. Secondly, by ignoring the status of the victim as the holder of the right that was violated by the offender and by attributing to the victim the supporting role of a witness, the state avoids acknowledging its own responsibility for not effectively protecting the rights of an individual and for allowing victimisations to happen.