Victimless Crimes

The term victimless crimes and its alternative phrasing crimes without victims refer to illegal acts that involve behavior that the participants engage in voluntarily. For example, the prostitute and the prostitute's customer both view their interaction as a business transaction in which, as in other commercial arrangements, both parties achieve what they desire. The prostitute obtains money and the customer has the desired sexual experience. Though the behavior is criminal, neither party will file a police report, unless, perhaps, the transaction involves theft or physical violence.

Similarly, narcotic dealers and their patrons voluntarily agree to a transaction much the same as that involving the purchase of alcohol or shopping for groceries. Abortion, which was illegal in the United States until 1973, poses a more complicated situation. Both the person performing the abortion and the woman undergoing it do so voluntarily. But the burning issue is whether the aborted fetus is a person, a victim deserving legal protection. No scientific evidence can adequately support whatever position is taken on this question; thus pro-life and pro-choice campaigns become, as does so much in the realm of victimless crimes, a matter of ideology, theology, and the exercise of political power.

The term crimes without victims entered the realm of social science when Edwin Schur of Tufts University employed it in 1965 as the title of a monograph. Schur, a Yale Law School graduate with a doctorate from the London School of Economics, had conceived the idea of victimless crimes when writing his dissertation on British drug policies. The term had precedents in Anglo-American law, including “sumptuary laws,” which forbade people of lesser social standing to dress themselves in elegant clothing. There also were “inchoate crimes,” such as loitering, catch-all statutes typically enacted to provide the police with the power to arrest persons they deemed to be suspicious. Similarly, the crime of drunk driving (driving under the influence) does not always involve a victim, but the behavior is outlawed on the presumption that the likelihood of an accident increases when a driver is intoxicated.

Consensual acts also exist that are forbidden by law because of religious principles, social abhorrence, or both. Polygamy, entered into willingly by all parties, and physician-induced suicide exemplify the first category, while riding a motorcycle without a helmet fits into the second category.

A fundamental issue about so-called crimes without victims is whether, though consensual in regard to the participants, they inflict harm upon others, such as spouses and families of compulsive gamblers and residents in a drug-trading neighborhood, or whether they injure society in regard to its moral traditions. Proponents argue that for its well-being, a society has to uphold standards of decency, as generally defined, or risk disorganization and disintegration. Victimless crimes also involve financial costs that must be borne by innocent taxpayers, for instance, when an uninsured motorcyclist not wearing a helmet suffers severe injuries and incurs medical costs that he or she cannot afford. Or when a motorcyclist without a helmet is struck on the head by a stone in the roadway [Page 995]and loses control of the vehicle, killing or maiming motorists on the same highway.

...