Victimization

Studying Victimization

The scientific study of the problem of victimization is called victimology, which is best classified as a branch of criminology. Although their suffering is quite familiar, the plight of victims was not seriously addressed until the second half of the twentieth century, when social scientists, criminal justice professionals, victim rights groups, journalists, businesses with anticrime products, and politicians began working to understand and address the needs of victims of crime.

The first victimologists were criminologists who were intrigued by the possibility that some victims were not completely innocent and might share responsibility with their offenders for their own misfortunes. The earliest writings about the victim-offender relationship emphasized actions and reactions, reciprocal influences, role reversals, and the blurring of distinctions between attacker and target. Victimologists developed the concepts of victim facilitation, precipitation, and provocation and applied them to real-life situations in order to describe and measure varying degrees of blameworthiness. According to victimologists, victim facilitation takes place whenever the injured parties make the wrongdoers' tasks easier through carelessness. Victim facilitation occurs when the targets of motor vehicle theft leave their cars parked with their keys dangling in the ignition, or when victims of residential burglaries leave their doors unlocked and their windows open. Victim precipitation occurs when the targets of attacks attract their assailants' attention through rash behavior, such as flashing a thick wad of bills in front of strangers in a tavern late at night. Victim provocation occurs when the person who is eventually injured or even killed initially instigated the confrontations, was the first to resort to physical force, or escalated the level of conflict.

Since the 1970s, victimology has attracted professionals who seek to ease the plight of crime victims. Through their research, victimologists, criminologists, and other social scientists (psychologists, sociologists, economists) strive to objectively measure the yearly incidence and lifetime prevalence of victimization, to discover the nature of the assistance victims require, and to evaluate the effectiveness of pro-victim activities. Volunteer activists, social workers, counselors, health professionals, and attorneys provide the actual services that enable infuriated and traumatized victims to recover from the harm they suffered at the hands of criminals. Advocacy organizations and self-help groups have emerged to provide support for special groups with particular needs, such as protective services for abused children, shelters for battered women, and crisis centers for victims of rape. Other groups attend to the needs of motorists and pedestrians injured in collisions caused by drunk drivers, individuals stalked and menaced by former lovers, and elders abused by relatives and caretakers.

...