Victimology

William G. Doerner, Steven P. Lab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134991716
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Victimology, Eighth Edition, shows how to transform the current criminal's justice system into a victim's justice system. Doerner and Lab, both well-regarded scholars, write compellingly about the true scope of crime victims' suffering in the United States. They lay out the sources of evidence available to victimology researchers. In later chapters, theory is woven together with the description of each topic and illustrated with specific examples. The second part of the book addresses the full impact of victimization. Part III, Types of Victimization, details specific problems ranging from violent crimes, child and elder abuse, and property crime to crime in the workplace. The authors emphasize their concern with the extent of criminal victimization, explain how obstacles hinder the pursuit of justice, and introduce the idea that reforms have rendered the system much more victim-friendly.

Appropriate for undergraduate as well as early graduate students in Victimology courses in Criminology, Criminal Justice, and Sociology programs, as well as Justice Studies, this book offers an instructor's manual with a test bank, as well as PowerPoint lecture slides and a companion site with student resources.

PART 1

Definition and Scope

CHAPTER 1

The Scope of Victimology

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading Chapter 1, you should be able to:

Discuss the change from a victim justice system to a criminal justice system.

Outline the early interest in victim typologies.

Account for the attention paid to victim precipitation, some findings, and some shortcomings.

List the areas that fall under “general victimology.”

Provide an overview of the broad topics which victimologists study.

Talk about the victim movement and how it has increased public interest in crime victims.

KEY TERMS

agent provocateur

criminal–victim dyad

critical victimology

deterrence

gemeinschaft

general victimology

gesellschaft

lex talionis

mala in se

restitution

retribution

typology

victim compensation

victim precipitation

INTRODUCTION

Something not very funny happened on the way to a formal system of justice. The victim was left out. As strange as it may sound, the bulk of history has seen crime victims become further removed from being an integral part of dealing with criminals. Fortunately, this trend is beginning to reverse itself. Recent years have seen an increased interest in the plight of crime victims and a movement toward reintegrating the victim into the criminal justice system. This chapter will look at the role of the victim throughout history and will trace the elimination of the victim from the social processing of criminal acts. We will see how victimology emerged and we will investigate the resurgence of interest in the victim.

THE VICTIM THROUGHOUT HISTORY

Most people take the existence of the formal criminal justice system for granted. They do not realize that this method of handling deviant activity has not been the norm throughout history. Indeed, the modern version of criminal justice is a relatively new phenomenon. In days gone by, responsibility for dealing with offenders fell to the victim and the victim’s kin. There were no “authorities” to turn to for help in “enforcing the law.” Victims were expected to fend for themselves, and society acceded to this arrangement.

This state of affairs was not outlined in any set of laws or legal code. With rare exceptions, written laws did not exist. Codes of behavior reflected prevailing social norms. Society recognized murder and other serious affronts as mala in se (totally unacceptable behavior). However, it was up to victims or their survivors to decide what action to take against the offender. Victims who wished to respond to offenses could not turn to judges for assistance or to jails for punishment. These institutions did not yet exist. Instead, victims had to take matters into their own hands.

This depiction does not imply that there were no provisions for victims to follow. Society recognized a basic system of retribution and restitution for offenders. In simplest terms, retribution meant the offender would suffer in proportion to the degree of harm caused by his or her actions. Oftentimes, retribution took the form of restitution, or making payment in an amount sufficient to render the victim whole again. If the offender was unable to make restitution, his or her kin were forced to assume the liability.

This response system emphasized the principle known as lex talionis—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Punishment was commensurate with the harm inflicted upon the victim. Perhaps the most important feature of this system was that victims and their relatives handled the problem and were the beneficiaries of any payments. This arrangement was truly a “victim justice system.”

This basic system of dealing with offensive behavior found its way into early codified laws. The Law of Moses, the Code of Hammurabi (2200 B.C.E.), and Roman law all entailed strong elements of individual responsibility for harms committed against others. Restitution and retribution were specific ingredients in many of these early codes. Part of the rationale behind this response was to deter such behavior in the future.

The major goal of deterrence is to prevent future transgressions. The thinking is that the lack of any enrichment or gain from criminal activity would make transgressive acts unattractive. Retribution and restitution attempt to re-establish the status quo that existed before the initial action of the offender. Thus, removing financial incentives would make it unprofitable to commit crimes.

This basic system of dealing with offensive behavior remained intact throughout the Middle Ages. Eventually, though, it fell into disuse. Two factors signaled the end of this victim justice system. The first change was the move by feudal barons to lay a claim to any compensation offenders paid to their victims (Schafer, 1968). These rulers saw this money as a lucrative way to increase their own wealth. The barons accomplished this goal by redefining criminal acts as violations against the state instead of against the victim. This strategy recast the state (the barons being the heads of the state) as the aggrieved party. The victim diminished in stature and was relegated to the status of witness for the state. Now the state could step in and reap the benefits of restitution.

A second factor which reduced the victim’s position was the enormous upheaval that was transforming society. Up until this time, society was predominantly rural and agrarian. People lived in small groups, eking out an existence from daily labor in the fields. Life was a rustic struggle to meet day-to-day needs.

People, for the most part, were self-sufficient and relied heavily upon their families for assistance. Families often lived in relative isolation from other people. Whenever a crime took place, it brought physical and economic harm not only to the individual victim but also to the entire family network. This simple gemeinschaft society (Toennies, 1957) could rely on the individual to handle his or her own problems.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the Industrial Revolution created a demand for larger urbanized communities. People took jobs in the new industries, leaving the rural areas and relocating to the cities. They settled into cramped quarters, surrounded by strangers. Neighbors no longer knew the people living next door. As faces blended into crowds, relationships grew more depersonalized. The interpersonal ties that once bound people together had vanished.

As this gesellschaft type of society continued to grow, the old victim justice practices crumbled even further. Crime began to threaten the delicate social fabric that now linked people together. At the same time, concern shifted away from making the victim whole to dealing with the criminal. Gradually, the victim justice system withered and the criminal justice system became its replacement. In fact, some observers would contend that the victim injustice system would be a more apt description.

Today, crime victims remain nothing more than witnesses for the state. Victims no longer take matters into their own hands to extract retribution and restitution from their offenders. The victim must call upon society to act. The development of formal law enforcement, courts, and correctional systems in the past few centuries has reflected an interest in protecting the state. For the most part, the criminal justice system simply forgot about victims and their best interests. Instead, the focus shifted to protecting the rights of the accused.

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE VICTIM

The criminal justice system spends the bulk of its time and energy trying to control criminals. It was within this preoccupation of understanding criminal activity and identifying the causes of criminal behavior that the victim was “rediscovered” in the 1940s. Interestingly, the victim emerged not as an individual worthy of sympathy or compassion but as a possible partner or contributor to his or her own demise. Students of criminal behavior began to look at the relationship between the victim and the offender in the hopes of better understanding the genesis of the criminal act.

As interest in victims began to sprout and attract more scholarly attention, writers began to grapple with a very basic issue. What exactly was victimology? Some people believed that victimology was a specialty area or a subfield within criminology. After all, every criminal event had to include a criminal and a victim, by definition. Others countered that because victimology was so broad and encompassing, it deserved to stand as a separate field or discipline in its own right. They foresaw the day when college catalogs would list victimology as a major area of study along with such pursuits as biology, criminology, psychology, mathematics, and political science.

WEB ACTIVITY

The concept of victim and the growth of interest in victims may be examined through a range of materials available through the Office for Victims of Crime (http://www.ojp.gov/ovc) and the documents in the OVC archive (http://ovc.gov/archive/index.html).

Early scholarly work in victimology focused considerable energy upon creating victim typologies. A typology is an effort to categorize observations into logical groupings to reach a better understanding of our social world (McKinney, 1950, 1969). As we shall see in the following sections, these early theoretical reflections pushed the field in a direction that eventually created an explosive and haunting reaction, nearly crippling this fledgling enterprise.

The Work of Hans von Hentig: The Criminal and His Victim

An early pioneer in victimology was a German scholar, Hans von Hentig. As a criminologist, von Hentig spent a great deal of time trying to discover what made a criminal predisposed to being a criminal. As he focused on crime victims, von Hentig began to wonder what it was that made the victim a victim. The key ingredient, according to von Hentig, was the criminal–victim dyad.

In an early publication, von Hentig (1941) claimed that the victim was often a contributing cause to the criminal act. One example would be an incident in which the ultimate victim began as the aggressor. However, for some reason, this person wound up becoming the loser in the confrontation. Von Hentig’s message was clear. Simply examining the outcome of a criminal event sometimes presents a distorted image of who the real victim is and who the real offender is. A closer inspection of the dynamics underlying the situation might reveal that the victim was a major contributor to his or her own victimization.

Von Hentig expanded upon the notion of the victim as an agent provocateur in a later book called The Criminal and His Victim. He explained that “increased attention should be paid to the crime-provocative function of the vic...