Social Movements and Victims
In addition to an academic field, victimology movements ensure that victims’ rights are protected and that victims have clear advocacy to help them recover from their victimization. This section discusses several of the social movements that have led to social changes around victimization. While the Civil Rights Movement is not discussed here, it is critical to acknowledge the importance of the movement in creation of laws and social norms around victimization.
The Women’s Movement
The women’s movement, also known as the feminist movement, started with the suffrage movement (centered on women as legal people with voting and property rights). The movement has had several phases, outlined next:
• First-wave feminism’s (1860s to 1920s) goal was to see that women had legal personhood to ensure that women’s voices were heard. Early feminists in the United States, such as like Susan B. Anthony, advocated against the sexual harassment of workers and the issues around domestic violence (Derene, Walker, & Stein, 2007). Through their work, first-wave feminists, the suffragettes, were able to secure women the right to vote (1920) and allow women to hold federal office, bringing women’s issues and women’s voices into the national conversation.
• Second-wave feminism (1960s to 1980s) focused on sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, and official legal inequalities. It also focused on victimization, domestic violence and marital rape, and advocated for changes in custody and divorce law. Their work helped victim advocacy and victim’s rights become a significant issue in the public discourse. As Miller (2016) points out, every sexual harassment law, rape crisis center, women’s health clinic, and all reproductive choices available to men and women was due to second-wave feminism. It also had a profound impact on victim theory, especially in terms of violence against women. • Note: First and second-wave feminism is critiqued because they focused on issues that were important to mostly white, middle-class women (Blackwell, 2011). The inclusion of diverse groups in the conversation is critical to understanding the social complexity that leads to victimization.
• Third-wave feminism (1990s to mid-2000s) explored the social construction of gender and sexuality, as opposed to being biological characteristics, and are therefore flexible and malleable (Adams St. Pierre, 2000). This changed the dialogue around what it means to be masculine/male and feminine/female, beginning the discussions around multiple gender identities that we see today. It promoted conversations around sexuality and other identities and how those identities intersect to create how we identify ourselves and how society reacts to these identities. A central focus to third-wave feminism was violence against women in all of its forms, for example derogatory language or sexual harassment.
The starting point of third-wave feminism was Anita Hill’s testimony against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, regarding how he allegedly sexually harassed her when he was her boss at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her testimony stands as one of the first times that sexual harassment was brought up as an issue for a public appointment. Image: Anita Hill. Authored by: Tim Pierce. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File