A View from the Shadows

Possibly the first ethnographic study of policy-making in a Justice Ministry, this is a detailed empirical investigation of the evolution of the Canadian Federal Ministry of the Solicitor General's Justice for Victims of Crime Initiative. Tracing the beginnings of the initiative in the American victims' movement and academic victimology, it also discusses the work of senior Civil Servants who imported ideas about victims into the Ministry, and examines the development of those ideas in the context of debates about capital punishment, the reform of policing, and violence against women.