By connecting sociological perspectives on sympathy with the concept of ‘ideal victims’, this article examines how sympathy forms and informs legal thought and practices in relation to victim status in Swedish courts. In its broadest sense, sympathy can be understood as an understanding and care for someone else’s suffering and in many contexts victimization and sympathy are densely entangled. However, since ideals of objectivity and neutrality prevail in court, emotional norms are narrow and sympathy is met with suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Swedish courts, I argue that while sympathetic feelings are mostly backgrounded, they are still a central part of court proceedings and deliberations. The main findings suggest that prosecutors and victims’ counsel use ‘sympathy cues’ to evoke the judges’ concern for the complainants and to facilitate their empathic imagination of the complainant’s situation. In relation to this finding, judges engage in emotion work in order to not be affected by these sympathy cues. The study also shows that in encounters with ‘ideal victims’ who perform a playful resistance to their victimization, legal actors show sympathy more freely and accept moments of temporary relief from the normal interaction order in court.

通过将同情的社会学观点与“理想受害者”的概念联系起来，本文研究了同情如何形成并影响与瑞典法院中受害者地位相关的法律思想和实践。在最广泛的意义上，同情可以理解为对他人痛苦的理解和关心，在许多情况下，受害和同情是紧密纠缠在一起的。然而，由于客观和中立的理想在法庭上盛行，情感规范是狭隘的，同情会受到怀疑。借鉴在瑞典法院进行的人种学实地调查，我认为虽然同情情绪大多是有背景的，但它们仍然是法庭诉讼和审议的核心部分。主要调查结果表明，检察官和受害者的律师使用“同情线索”来唤起法官对申诉人的关注，并促进他们对申诉人处境的同理心想象。关于这一发现，法官从事情感工作是为了不受这些同情线索的影响。该研究还表明，在遇到对他们的受害表现出顽皮抵抗的“理想受害者”时，法律行为者会更自由地表现出同情，并接受法庭上正常互动秩序的暂时缓解。