My book Second Wounds: Victims' Rights and the Media in the U.S. (forthcoming, Duke University Press) asks: how did the story of crime change in the U.S. from the 1960s to the present? And why did victims become so visible in these stories? I trace this change to the birth of victims' rights in the law-and-order movement of the 1960s and 1970s; then I follow how it moved into the crime victim movement and other social institutions like journalism education and newspapers as well as online activist communities. Along the way, I discovered how victims' rights discourse, and the movements from which it formed, amplified the voice of victims in the story of crime, and transformed that story from one about crime to another about criminal justice. Second Wounds focuses in on the specific communication strategies and network building victims' rights activists used to move victims into the media. In the process, I found that victims' rights discourse constituted a historically specific political grammar for representing crime, a way of talking about and depicting crime victims organized around the figure of the secondary victim and the affective qualities of secondary victimization. The victims' rights movement has helped make lasting changes in the ways journalists are being trained to cover crime and violence, the ways news media cover victims of crime and disaster, and the ways the nation remembers its victims.

Second Wounds describes this series of transformations, but it provides an explanation for how and why they happened in the ways they did.