Dietrich, Noelle D.2024-05-142024-05-142024-05-102024-05-102024-05-14http://hdl.handle.net/1993/38224This study explores the victim impact statements (VIS) by family members of murder victims, utilizing a multi-perspectival adaptation to hermeneutical phenomenology. Three distinct readings of 78 statements highlight the ways in which murder is experienced at the individual, familial, and societal level. The use of this novel tri-layered hermeneutical method draws out important nuance and differences when read in the context of an abstract individual versus that person as the mother, sister or son of a murder victim. Additional insight drawn into the hermeneutic circle from historical contextual factors, such as colonization or gang involvement further delineates the experiences within these narratives. The research was guided by questions of what is being said in VIS and what VIS authors might tell us about murder as a phenomenon. The narratives reveal critical insights into the way murder operates and discriminates in this Canadian prairie urban environment in which 18% of the population, yet fifty percent of homicide victims, are Indigenous. In the first study of this kind, that examines Indigenous and non-Indigenous VIS, existing perspectives about the impacts of murder are questioned. Replacing an individualistic trauma lens with a wider social lens highlights how the crime of murder, and the societal responses to it, are rooted in colonialist legal and social perspectives that result in revictimization of these families. The findings also identify the disproportionate burden of murder on women, exposing discriminatory policies within victim and family services with broader implications across Canada. Greater still, this research uncovers an interesting pattern in the way VIS are written that overcomes the instrumental/expressive debate with an agentic model of VIS, leading into theoretical territory beyond Canadian borders. The agency and ritual-like process undertaken by these VIS authors attests to the powerful role of emotion in justice and offers a new perspective that transforms the authors from bereaved victims into empowered citizens demanding acknowledgement as parties wronged by crime. Through this paradigm shift we might finally move away from the pathologized-victim lens to one that acknowledges the agency of victims’ kin in their role as primary stakeholders in this crime.engmoral justiceIndigenous victimsfamily co-victimsritual-like justicethe FuriesErinyesexpressive value of VISinstrumental value of VISIndigenous men and boyswomen co-victimssibling co-victimsspouse/partner co-victimsdoctoral thesis