Victimology

The field of victimology began as a branch of criminal justice studies focusing on the victims of crimes, with particular attention to identifying characteristics of people who became victims and the effects on an individual of being victimized.

However, the current definition of the field is much broader, so a victim is defined as anyone who suffers harm, while the effect of victimization has been broadened to include the consequences of being a member of a vulnerable group (even if a particular individual has no suffered harm).

Victimology in the context of disaster relief focuses on which individuals are most likely to be victims in a disaster, whether natural (such as the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti) or human-made (such as industrial accidents like the 1984 disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India) and the effects of victimization on the individual and their community.

It is not always possible or desirable to draw a distinct line between natural and human-made disasters, and often a disaster results from a combination of both “acts of God” and human behavior. For instance, the immediate cause of a flood may be a natural occurrence such as unusually heavy rainfall, but the effects of this rainfall may be exacerbated by human decisions such as allowing construction in the flood plain, building inadequate levees or failing to maintain them, or deforestation due to agriculture. With different human decisions, the same amount of rainfall in the same area might not have caused a flood at all. Similarly, while any industrial process carries risks, some charge that Union Carbide knowingly operated the Bhopal plant under unsafe conditions, which led to an explosion, the release of toxic chemicals, and thousands of deaths, while insufficient infrastructure and planning was cited by many as a co-contributor to the effects of the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti.