Getting answers to ‘Why me?’

Published: Thursday, January 16th, 2025


This is a blog by Dr Diana Batchelor, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Criminology at the University of Sheffield School of Law. Her current research explores victim-survivors’ understanding of the causes of crime. Diana has worked in criminal justice and conflict resolution in the UK, South Africa, and Lebanon, in roles ranging from frontline support work to evaluation, research and policy development. You can get in touch at d.k.batchelor@sheffield.ac.uk

 

Many people affected by crime ask themselves: why me? 

Some of them want to directly ask this question to the person who committed the crime. Studies find this is one of the key reasons people give for wanting to take part in restorative processes – and it is of course the origin of the charity’s name, encapsulating one of the core aspects of the meeting that Will Riley and Peter Woolf experienced.

A surprising finding

Knowing all this, I wasn’t surprised when I interviewed victim-survivors before they took part in a restorative meeting, and many of them said they hoped to ask the offender, ‘why me?’. I was surprised, however, when I interviewed them again after the restorative process, and not many of them had received a satisfactory answer.

Importantly, almost all of them were satisfied with the Restorative Justice process. They were pleased they had taken part, and they had experienced numerous benefits. For most of them, the opportunity to ask ‘why me?’ was more important than the actual answer, and they felt satisfaction from other factors: feeling brave enough to face the offender, having other questions answered, preventing the offender from doing it again, or understanding more about the offender’s prison sentence.

In a few cases, the people I interviewed said that the answer to ‘why me?’ did make a difference. Several people were told that they were victimised ‘at random’ and this reduced their sense of self-blame and their fear that they might be victimised again in future. It is worth noting that most of the people I spoke to had experienced serious and complex crimes, and perhaps answers to ‘why me?’ were rare because there simply is no reasonable answer to ‘why did you murder my child?’ or ‘why did you rape me?’. Satisfactory answers to ‘why did you burgle my house?’ or ‘why did you take my phone?’ might be easier to find. Nevertheless, answers to this famous and almost universal question were so surprisingly rare among the victim-survivors I spoke to during my PhD research that it left me wanting to find out more.

Taking a step back

If we want to know how ‘asking why’ helps in restorative processes, maybe we first need to explore victim-survivors’ understanding of ‘why’ more generally. Why do most people think the crime happened? Why do they think they were targeted? What kinds of things change their minds (including but not limited to RJ processes)? Do certain explanations make the impact of the crime better or worse? Do certain explanations affect what victim-survivors want in terms of justice?

The existing literature gives us a few clues, but it is surprisingly limited. We know, for example, that people who blame themselves often feel worse about what happened. We know that people strive to find meaning in traumatic events, so they might look for explanations that fit with their own goals or sense of purpose in life. And we know that people who see crime as caused by individuals are more likely to want to punish the perpetrators, compared to those who see crime as caused by societal factors. But beyond these main areas of study, we know very little about victim-survivors’ explanations for their victimisation, or how their understanding affects other aspects of their lives. 

These are the questions underlying the current research project I am leading. We hope to answer them by interviewing 80 people who have experienced a crime. We will interview 40 people in the UK and 40 in Indonesia, in order to explore the widest possible variety of responses to crime among people with different languages, religions, cultures, and experiences of justice.  

Varied explanations

We don’t have any published results from the current study yet, so watch this space. We have just completed the interviews in Indonesia and will be carrying out the UK phase of the research from January to September 2025 – so if you are in the UK, have been a victim of crime and are interested in participating, please get in touch!

So far, we have been learning that victim-survivors hold a wide range of explanations for the crime that happened to them – so varied that they are hard to describe succinctly. The social ecological model is helping us to map these different explanations, a model that was originally proposed as a way to understand human development. The people we have interviewed so far have told us about causes of crime that appear in every circle of the model, including bystander silence, poverty, relationship dynamics, government policies, racism, misogyny, evil spirits, and even God. Only a few people have been solely concerned with the motive of the individual offender; many of them have held complex, overlapping, and seemingly contradictory explanations at each of the levels. It seems victimisation can bring out not only the detective in each of us, but also the psychologist, sociologist, scientist, and philosopher.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1. A map of the causes of victimisation according to victim-survivors we have interviewed, adapted from the social ecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1977)

 

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