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this was provided for in sections 1 and 6 of the Criminal Justice Act 1972 to allow for
payment for personal injuries caused to victims as a result of crimes and for loss as a result
of theft.
While the traditional role of the victim, presenting as the chief witness for the prosecution,
remained unaltered in the trial of offenders’ guilt, the victim received a new status in the
sentencing part of the trial, where the victims needs and losses were now considered
alongside those of the convicted offender. The victims’ avenues of redress were extended
for the first time from the Civil Courts to include the Criminal Courts. Following a
Report of the Advisory Council on the Penal System specifically tasked to consider how
the principle of personal reparation might be given a more prominent place in the penal
system (Home Office 1970a), the sub-Committee under Lord Widgery recommended that
the criminal courts be allowed to order compensation in favour of the victim of crime,
which proposal was carriedforwardunder the Criminal Justice Act 1972.
Although the position of the victim was undoubtedly advanced by this legislative change
which allowed courts to award compensation to victims, their position was still peripheral
within criminal justice discourse. Whatever initiatives that were brought forward
concerning victims, such measures were primarily motivated by penological rather than
victimological concerns where reparation by the “undisciplined hooligan” to pay back
society for their wrong-doing had a greater focus than the specific needs of particular
victims (Kilcommins 2002:392).
But the ideologyof reparation was not new. The practice in Borstals to provide voluntary
services to the local community, whether during the urgencyof the great floods of 1957 in
rescuing farm stock and helping in flood relief works, or in the calmer atmosphere of
everyday life, where Borstal boys attended regularly at a Polio training club on Sunday
mornings, at an old folks home at weekends, at a Darby and Joan Club on Saturday
afternoons and at Spastic swimming lessons on Friday nights (Home Office
1967:CMND.3408, 17) presaged the deliberations of the Wootton committee with the idea
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