RT Article
T1 Drizzling sympathy: Ideal victims and flows of sympathy in Swedish courts
JF International review of victimology
VO 28
IS 3
SP 263
OP 285
A1 Törnqvist, Nina
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1814282106
AB By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal interaction order in court.
K1 law and emotion
K1 Court
K1 Victimology
K1 ideal victims
K1 Sympathy
DO 10.1177/02697580211035586