Environmental Victimisation and Conflict Resolution: A Case Study of e-Waste

Abstract

Environmental crime and the victimisation it causes is a topic that has been neglected in both victimology and criminology for a long time. In the last decades, criminology has had an increasing focus on environmental crime (White, 2009). This fits within a broader critical development, which looks beyond crime towards legally ambiguous behaviours that cause social harm (Hillyard et al., 2004). The harmful effects of several transnational environmental crimes are the impacts on the quality of water, soil, and air, as well as on the survival of endangered species and on climate change (Walters, 2007; Stretesky and Lynch, 2009). Identifying the victims is not straightforward, because it requires thinking about both geographical and temporal dimensions of victimisation, evoking a more abstract and hidden victim (Goodey, 2005).