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Robyn Holder

Griffith University, Griffith Criminology Institute, Post-Doc

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In my current role as a Research Fellow working on Professor Kathleen Daly's ARC Discovery Project on innovative justice responses to sexual victimisation, I am examining the meaning of money to victim/ survivors and influences to law reform on criminal injuries compensation. It took me nearly 8 years to complete my PhD as I was working full time as a statutory victim advocate for most of it. However, staying connected to what really happens to victims of crime and violence in the criminal justice system was important to the argument in my thesis about victims as citizens in relation to state authority. I remain involved in national and international networks on victims' rights, justice responses to violence against women, and reconceptualising the role of victims in criminal justice.
Supervisors: Professor Kathleen Daly, Professor Susanne Karstedt, and Professor Peter Grabosky
Phone: +61 (07) 3735 3440
Address: Griffith Criminology Institute,
Griffith University
Mt Gravatt Campus
Brisbane, Qld 4122

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Papers by Robyn Holder

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Europe as a Comparative Site on Victim Participation in Criminal Justice

International criminology, Apr 16, 2024

Victim participation is deep-rooted in criminal justice globally but has been contentious in cont... more Victim participation is deep-rooted in criminal justice globally but has been contentious in contemporary academic, legal and policy debates. This Introduction to the Special Issue on Victim Participation in Europe explores what is similar and different to these debates using a European lens. The nature of the continent's civil legal systems provides broad scope for victim participation, but familiar challenges appear. These challenges, such as the State's claim of a monopoly on criminal offences and justice professionals' commitment to continuing 'the way things are,' are not unique to civil systems. However, the diversity and tenacity of 'the local' within and across the countries of Europe offers enormous scope for victim participation in criminal justice. In this Introduction, we explore ways in which researchers could further investigate these opportunities from a comparative perspective.

Human Dignity, Rights and Victim Participation in Criminal Justice

International criminology, Mar 22, 2024

Human dignity is the cornerstone of human rights and central to the Treaty on European Union (EU)... more Human dignity is the cornerstone of human rights and central to the Treaty on European Union (EU) and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is embedded within constitutions across EU countries. This strong commitment to human dignity has given rise to extensive reflection on its centrality to correcting rights violations, inequality, discrimination and the oppressive conduct of state institutions. This article explores the work that human dignity does for people victimised by crime in the EU. We argue that the agentic human, central to the idea of victim participation, originates in human dignity. However, using a dignity lens, an analysis of victims' rights documents and rights research reveals a paradox within the victim-friendly civil law jurisdictions of Europe. That is, the procedural position of the victim established in tradition and law is undermined by justice professionals' attachment to the idea of the state's ownership of the violation. We then discuss jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights relevant to the protection of human dignity to identify how this tension between the protection of individual victim rights, especially the right to remedy, and public interest is adjudicated. We suggest that the Court's attention to individual rights should be harnessed by victim rights advocates and lawyers. While the victim's procedural role matters to their substantive and meaningful participation in criminal proceedings, it is their right and capacity to act independent of the state that may matter more.

Exploring Victim Interests in a Specialist Family Violence Jurisdiction

Risk assessment in domestic and family violence and the Police role

Beyond Vulnerability: Reconceiving Victims as Citizens

Social Science Research Network, 2022

Victim Support in Australia - a Road Map for the Future

Ideas of justice

Cooperative Witness and Ideal Victim: looking again at agency and choice

Victim participation in criminal justice: A quantitative systematic and critical literature review

International Review of Victimology

Meaningful participation in criminal justice by victims of violence is an aspiration of advocates... more Meaningful participation in criminal justice by victims of violence is an aspiration of advocates working across domestic and international jurisdictions. Researchers have examined a range of participatory activities undertaken by violence victims. However, there has been no review of research that could build shared understanding of the content and contours of ‘participation’, its benefits and disbenefits to victims, nor assess the quality of justice it delivers. This article presents the first systematic quantitative and critical review of the topic. Electronic literature databases were searched to identify empirical research of victim participation whether in domestic or international criminal justice. Searches for peer-reviewed academic English-language journal articles found 58 studies matching the selection criteria and published between 2002 and 2021. Just over half were common law-based studies that were themselves mostly conducted in the United States. Definitions of victim...

2REPEAT VICTIMISATION & THE ROLE OF THE CRIME VICTIM IN PREVENTION STRATEGIES

The phenomenon of repeat victimisation has been recognised for some considerable time not only by... more The phenomenon of repeat victimisation has been recognised for some considerable time not only by criminologists but also by police and victim support workers (1). Yet its implications for policy and program development in law enforcement and crime prevention- let alone in support services for crime victims (2)- is only lately being acknowledged. This time lag has occurred for a number of different reasons (3): · a number of different victimisation realities have been conflated and different terminologies have been used almost interchangeably to describe them; · the law enforcement and justice systems are constructed to address the single crime incident and moreover make little effort to link data or share information; · crime prevention practice is itself an evolving field which is only recently, at least in Europe and North America, developing increasingly sophisticated responses on top of traditional opportunity reduction and situational prevention methods; · actually quantifying...

Evaluation of the Specialist Domestic and Family Violence Court Trial in Southport – summary of final report

Aborigines of Australia

Cooperative Witness and Ideal Victim: looking again at agency and choice

Sequencing Justice: A Longitudinal Study of Justice Goals of Domestic Violence Victims

British Journal of Criminology, Sep 28, 2017

What women as victims of domestic violence want from criminal justice has long interested researc... more What women as victims of domestic violence want from criminal justice has long interested researchers and advocates. This article foregrounds the ways in which 'justice' matters to victims and how a desire for justice may change over time. We find that victims have multiple justice goals, which are ordered and unfold through the criminal justice process. The goals are directed towards three domains of victim, offender and community; and are influenced by both personal and public interests. Accountability is a threshold goal from which others-punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation or another-may be contemplated. From the perspective of victims, achieving justice is sequencing these goals through hybrid processes with differing degrees of victim participation.

Victim Participation in Criminal Justice: A Quantitative Systematic and Critical Literature Review

SSRN Electronic Journal

$Research paper thumbnail of We Don\u27t Shoot Our Wounded$

We Don\u27t Shoot Our Wounded

The term family violence is preferred by many Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people and serv... more The term family violence is preferred by many Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people and service providers. It is also used within the ACT criminal justice system to describe abusive and/ or violent behaviour that takes place between people in a range of different family and intimate relationships with each other. The term can encompass a range of verbal, physical and sexually abusive behaviours in addition to controlling actions and actions that demean a person's spirit and connection to community. The terms victim and perpetrator are cautiously used by many Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people and service providers. There may be far less distinction than for non-Indigenous people between the terms as separate and real-life categories. The terms are nonetheless used in this report as a way of enabling reflection on the circumstances which brought people into contact with the criminal justice system and with services.

Participating in justice

Co-producing prosecution

Criminal Justice and Regulation Revisited, May 8, 2018

Public prosecution authorities are a relatively recent institutional development within common la... more Public prosecution authorities are a relatively recent institutional development within common law criminal justice systems. Those who work as prosecutors are a greater unknown. They rarely give a public account of themselves and, when doing so, present behind a picture of statutory stability and continuity. Their views are veiled in the language of neutrality and restraint. This chapter presents analysis of the discourse of a small group of ex-Directors of Public Prosecution from six different jurisdictions in Australia. The reflections of this elite group are used as a single narrative to identify and map core organising concepts. The chapter works through different depictions of intellectual and technical elites as high mandarins to explore how power works in contemporary criminal justice. This is a pre-publication version of a chapter in a forthcoming collection, The Evolving Role of the Public Prosecutor, edited by Philip Stenning and Victoria Colvin (Routledge). Please refer to the published version for correct page citations.

Victims, Legal Consciousness, and Legal Mobilisation

The Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice, 2017

This chapter considers the social construction of law from victim perspectives. Asking what “law... more This chapter considers the social construction of law from victim perspectives. Asking what “law” is to victims helps to illuminate the understandings they bring to legal mobilisation. Through a re-examination of the literature on reporting crime, the author explores the spaces between meaning-making and people’s actions. It takes seriously the idea that ordinary people can be legal actors yet takes a critical view of what law offers and how people assess its relationship to them. The mobilisation of criminal law is discussed as a practice influenced by cultural as well as legal schemas. The chapter argues that victims not only make law by activating it but also participate in civic governance.

Claiming Justice: An Analysis of Child Sexual Abuse Complainants’ Justice Goals Reported during Investigative Interviews

Laws

Investigative interviewing of children who report sexual victimisation focuses on helping childre... more Investigative interviewing of children who report sexual victimisation focuses on helping children tell in their own words what happened. Children may say other things important to them such as their justice goals. We conducted the first research into this possibility in an exploratory analysis of 300 transcripts of actual interviews with child complainants aged 3 to 15 years. Building on an earlier study involving adults, we explored what goals children may articulate, when in the interview process their goals are relayed and in response to which interviewer prompts. Our analysis revealed that most children did articulate one or more justice goals during these interviews, especially their desire for acknowledgement of the victimisation and its wrongfulness. Children articulated their justice goals spontaneously and largely without any direct prompting by the police officer. These findings suggest that there is more that institutions [and researchers] can learn from carefully listen...

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Europe as a Comparative Site on Victim Participation in Criminal Justice

International criminology, Apr 16, 2024

Victim participation is deep-rooted in criminal justice globally but has been contentious in cont... more Victim participation is deep-rooted in criminal justice globally but has been contentious in contemporary academic, legal and policy debates. This Introduction to the Special Issue on Victim Participation in Europe explores what is similar and different to these debates using a European lens. The nature of the continent's civil legal systems provides broad scope for victim participation, but familiar challenges appear. These challenges, such as the State's claim of a monopoly on criminal offences and justice professionals' commitment to continuing 'the way things are,' are not unique to civil systems. However, the diversity and tenacity of 'the local' within and across the countries of Europe offers enormous scope for victim participation in criminal justice. In this Introduction, we explore ways in which researchers could further investigate these opportunities from a comparative perspective.

Human Dignity, Rights and Victim Participation in Criminal Justice

International criminology, Mar 22, 2024

Human dignity is the cornerstone of human rights and central to the Treaty on European Union (EU)... more Human dignity is the cornerstone of human rights and central to the Treaty on European Union (EU) and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is embedded within constitutions across EU countries. This strong commitment to human dignity has given rise to extensive reflection on its centrality to correcting rights violations, inequality, discrimination and the oppressive conduct of state institutions. This article explores the work that human dignity does for people victimised by crime in the EU. We argue that the agentic human, central to the idea of victim participation, originates in human dignity. However, using a dignity lens, an analysis of victims' rights documents and rights research reveals a paradox within the victim-friendly civil law jurisdictions of Europe. That is, the procedural position of the victim established in tradition and law is undermined by justice professionals' attachment to the idea of the state's ownership of the violation. We then discuss jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights relevant to the protection of human dignity to identify how this tension between the protection of individual victim rights, especially the right to remedy, and public interest is adjudicated. We suggest that the Court's attention to individual rights should be harnessed by victim rights advocates and lawyers. While the victim's procedural role matters to their substantive and meaningful participation in criminal proceedings, it is their right and capacity to act independent of the state that may matter more.

Exploring Victim Interests in a Specialist Family Violence Jurisdiction

Risk assessment in domestic and family violence and the Police role

Beyond Vulnerability: Reconceiving Victims as Citizens

Social Science Research Network, 2022

Victim Support in Australia - a Road Map for the Future

Ideas of justice

Cooperative Witness and Ideal Victim: looking again at agency and choice

Victim participation in criminal justice: A quantitative systematic and critical literature review

International Review of Victimology

Meaningful participation in criminal justice by victims of violence is an aspiration of advocates... more Meaningful participation in criminal justice by victims of violence is an aspiration of advocates working across domestic and international jurisdictions. Researchers have examined a range of participatory activities undertaken by violence victims. However, there has been no review of research that could build shared understanding of the content and contours of ‘participation’, its benefits and disbenefits to victims, nor assess the quality of justice it delivers. This article presents the first systematic quantitative and critical review of the topic. Electronic literature databases were searched to identify empirical research of victim participation whether in domestic or international criminal justice. Searches for peer-reviewed academic English-language journal articles found 58 studies matching the selection criteria and published between 2002 and 2021. Just over half were common law-based studies that were themselves mostly conducted in the United States. Definitions of victim...

2REPEAT VICTIMISATION & THE ROLE OF THE CRIME VICTIM IN PREVENTION STRATEGIES

The phenomenon of repeat victimisation has been recognised for some considerable time not only by... more The phenomenon of repeat victimisation has been recognised for some considerable time not only by criminologists but also by police and victim support workers (1). Yet its implications for policy and program development in law enforcement and crime prevention- let alone in support services for crime victims (2)- is only lately being acknowledged. This time lag has occurred for a number of different reasons (3): · a number of different victimisation realities have been conflated and different terminologies have been used almost interchangeably to describe them; · the law enforcement and justice systems are constructed to address the single crime incident and moreover make little effort to link data or share information; · crime prevention practice is itself an evolving field which is only recently, at least in Europe and North America, developing increasingly sophisticated responses on top of traditional opportunity reduction and situational prevention methods; · actually quantifying...

Evaluation of the Specialist Domestic and Family Violence Court Trial in Southport – summary of final report

Aborigines of Australia

Cooperative Witness and Ideal Victim: looking again at agency and choice

Sequencing Justice: A Longitudinal Study of Justice Goals of Domestic Violence Victims

British Journal of Criminology, Sep 28, 2017

What women as victims of domestic violence want from criminal justice has long interested researc... more What women as victims of domestic violence want from criminal justice has long interested researchers and advocates. This article foregrounds the ways in which 'justice' matters to victims and how a desire for justice may change over time. We find that victims have multiple justice goals, which are ordered and unfold through the criminal justice process. The goals are directed towards three domains of victim, offender and community; and are influenced by both personal and public interests. Accountability is a threshold goal from which others-punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation or another-may be contemplated. From the perspective of victims, achieving justice is sequencing these goals through hybrid processes with differing degrees of victim participation.

Victim Participation in Criminal Justice: A Quantitative Systematic and Critical Literature Review

SSRN Electronic Journal

$Research paper thumbnail of We Don\u27t Shoot Our Wounded$

We Don\u27t Shoot Our Wounded

The term family violence is preferred by many Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people and serv... more The term family violence is preferred by many Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people and service providers. It is also used within the ACT criminal justice system to describe abusive and/ or violent behaviour that takes place between people in a range of different family and intimate relationships with each other. The term can encompass a range of verbal, physical and sexually abusive behaviours in addition to controlling actions and actions that demean a person's spirit and connection to community. The terms victim and perpetrator are cautiously used by many Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander people and service providers. There may be far less distinction than for non-Indigenous people between the terms as separate and real-life categories. The terms are nonetheless used in this report as a way of enabling reflection on the circumstances which brought people into contact with the criminal justice system and with services.

Participating in justice

Co-producing prosecution

Criminal Justice and Regulation Revisited, May 8, 2018

Public prosecution authorities are a relatively recent institutional development within common la... more Public prosecution authorities are a relatively recent institutional development within common law criminal justice systems. Those who work as prosecutors are a greater unknown. They rarely give a public account of themselves and, when doing so, present behind a picture of statutory stability and continuity. Their views are veiled in the language of neutrality and restraint. This chapter presents analysis of the discourse of a small group of ex-Directors of Public Prosecution from six different jurisdictions in Australia. The reflections of this elite group are used as a single narrative to identify and map core organising concepts. The chapter works through different depictions of intellectual and technical elites as high mandarins to explore how power works in contemporary criminal justice. This is a pre-publication version of a chapter in a forthcoming collection, The Evolving Role of the Public Prosecutor, edited by Philip Stenning and Victoria Colvin (Routledge). Please refer to the published version for correct page citations.

Victims, Legal Consciousness, and Legal Mobilisation

The Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice, 2017

This chapter considers the social construction of law from victim perspectives. Asking what “law... more This chapter considers the social construction of law from victim perspectives. Asking what “law” is to victims helps to illuminate the understandings they bring to legal mobilisation. Through a re-examination of the literature on reporting crime, the author explores the spaces between meaning-making and people’s actions. It takes seriously the idea that ordinary people can be legal actors yet takes a critical view of what law offers and how people assess its relationship to them. The mobilisation of criminal law is discussed as a practice influenced by cultural as well as legal schemas. The chapter argues that victims not only make law by activating it but also participate in civic governance.

Claiming Justice: An Analysis of Child Sexual Abuse Complainants’ Justice Goals Reported during Investigative Interviews

Laws

Investigative interviewing of children who report sexual victimisation focuses on helping childre... more Investigative interviewing of children who report sexual victimisation focuses on helping children tell in their own words what happened. Children may say other things important to them such as their justice goals. We conducted the first research into this possibility in an exploratory analysis of 300 transcripts of actual interviews with child complainants aged 3 to 15 years. Building on an earlier study involving adults, we explored what goals children may articulate, when in the interview process their goals are relayed and in response to which interviewer prompts. Our analysis revealed that most children did articulate one or more justice goals during these interviews, especially their desire for acknowledgement of the victimisation and its wrongfulness. Children articulated their justice goals spontaneously and largely without any direct prompting by the police officer. These findings suggest that there is more that institutions [and researchers] can learn from carefully listen...

Decoding Hegemony: Exploring the Discourse of a Prosecuting Elite

Public prosecution authorities are a relatively recent institutional development within common la... more Public prosecution authorities are a relatively recent institutional development within common law criminal justice systems. Although prosecution occupies a critical place within criminal justice, it is under-researched. Those who work as prosecutors are an even greater unknown. They rarely give a public account of themselves. Their views are veiled in the language of neutrality and restraint. This chapter presents analysis of the discourse of a small group of ex-Directors of Public Prosecution from six different jurisdictions in Australia. The reflections of this elite group are used as a single narrative in order to identify and map their core organising concepts. The chapter works through different depictions of intellectual and technical elites as high mandarins to explore how power works in contemporary criminal justice.