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Vanessa Barker
Politics of Pain: State Governance, Moral Protest, & the Varied Impacts of Social
Movements
01.05.04
Our work was ‘in the field of pain and death.’
Robert Cover
By the 1990s, the victims movement emerged as a major force in American politics. Victims
demanded: new rights as crime victims; increased participation in criminal case processing; and
stiffer penalties for criminal offenders. Like the new social movements (e.g., women’s, peace,
environmental, animal, and gay rights), the victims movement demanded remedies not
necessarily linked to resource redistribution and class-based politics. Instead, victims engaged in
and advanced “moral protest” and identity politics, that is to say, protest fueled by thoughts and
feelings about what a good and just society ought to look like (Jasper 1997; Polletta 1997).
Victims not only tapped into a sense of insecurity many experience in late modern societies
(Garland), they channeled this generalized feeling of vulnerability into moral outrage about pain
and victimization (Rorty in Boutellier 2000).
Despite widespread mobilization and strategic alliances with political elites, victims’
moral protest did not lead to sweeping social reform or uniform public policy. Instead, we see
significant variation in what victims actually accomplished. Some victim-challengers failed to
realize their own goals while some changed the way we think about victims and the way states
govern.
This paper seeks to explain why the victims movement led to radically different outcomes
in different political contexts. Victim-challengers in Washington State, for example, not only
gained new advantages, they reconfigured the exercise of state power as victims became
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