This chapter explores the parameters of the study of the crime victim, and the history and scope of the academic subdiscipline within criminology known as victimology. It discusses victimological perspectives; researching victims of crime; and the extent, nature of, and risks to criminal victimization. The final section examines public policy and practice, considering how and why ‘victim’ is a problematic concept in the context of compensation. It problematizes a number of taken-for-granted victimological concepts, such as victimization and crime victim. This section also shows that key concepts, such as victim precipitation, culpability, provocation, and ideal victim connect to particular ways of constructing the crime victim and understanding victimization.
Chapter
22. Victims
Pamela Davies
Book
David Downes, Paul Rock, and Eugene McLaughlin
Understanding Deviance provides a comprehensive guide to the current state of criminological theory. It outlines the principal theories of crime, deviance, and rule-breaking, discussing them chronologically, and placing them in their European and North American contexts considering major criticisms that have been voiced against them, and constructing defences where appropriate. The volume has been revised and brought up-to-date to include new issues of crime, deviance, disorder, criminal justice, and social control in the early twenty-first century. It considers new trends in criminological theory such as cultural criminology and public criminology, further discussion of how post-modernism and the ‘risk society’ is reformulating crime and deviance, and an assessment of how different approaches address the fall in crime rates across most democratic and developed societies. There is also a new chapter on victimology.
Chapter
12. Victimology
Victimology is now regarded as a central component to the study of crime and deviance. Victim-based analysis enables understanding of different aspects of criminal and deviant behaviour and is redefining focal research concerns across a range of crimes. This academic development has been matched by the recognition by the criminal justice system of the consequences of victimization and moves towards both victim services and a victim-centred justice process, and by increasing political concern with victimization. The chapter analyses victimology’s key conceptual approaches, ideas, and typologies and examines whether and how different criminological perspectives understand the victim. The chapter considers the issue of victim precipitation, in the context of offender motivation, crime events operandi, and differential risks. It concludes with a discussion of how victimology has connected across to human rights violations with restorative and transitional justice foregrounding consideration of global issues such as truth-telling, reconciliation, reparations, peace-building, and normative compliance.
Chapter
16. Where is ‘victimology’ in an era of #MeToo?
Maria M. Ttofi, Adrian Grounds, and Lidia Puigvert
This chapter covers the field of victimology reflecting the increasing recognition of how victims experience crime and other forms of ill-treatment. Sexual abuse gained much attention recently, especially with individuals self-disclosing their personal experiences on social media platforms through the #MeToo movement. Additionally, social media platforms facilitated the new collective potential. The chapter clarifies that victimology is centrally concerned with the understanding of the experience of suffering that recognizes antecedents and risk factors for offending identified in longitudinal studies. The possibility of suffering provides an integrative concept for criminology that correlates to the notions of victimization, offending, and the operation of criminal justice.
Chapter
7. Victimology
Angus Nurse
This chapter assesses victimology, which has become an important sub-discipline within criminology. Victimology includes the study of victimisation as well as the challenges of legal and institutional definitions of the ‘victim’. Discussions include debates concerning victims’ rights and activism and how victimhood has come to be understood and responded to. The chapter then considers both narrow and wider ideas of victimisation, and examines whether and how criminal justice processes and public policy have developed in response to victims’ needs. While victims are really the people who the criminal investigation and trial are meant to serve, they are often not part of the process. The chapter also looks at a key part of victimology, which is the use of statistical evidence on the levels of victimisation.
