The Victim in Criminal Law and Justice

' Confronting superficial accounts that regard the victim as coming to be excluded from modern criminal justice, Kirchengast argues that the victim has always participated in power relations that form criminal justice as we know it. This work directly challenges taken for granted assumptions about the state as the author of what we now recognize as criminal justice, and reveals the genealogical process through which the victim became the constitutive ghost in the machine. The implications of this for understanding criminal justice in the present are far reaching . ' - Dr Pat O' Malley, Carleton University, Canada

' . . . the book is written in an engaging and accessible style. Certainly, the author is to be commended in putting forward a powerful and original analysis in his application of Foucault' s ' genealogical method' to the history of the crime victim. ' - Jonathan Doak, British Journal of Criminology, Vol 48, no 1, January 2008

' By retracing the role of the victim in the story of criminal justice Kirchengast offers us something admirably ambitious. ' - Stephen Riley, Internet Law Book Reviews