Revitalizing Victimization Theory

Revisions, Applications, and New Directions

Travis C. Pratt, Jillian J. Turanovic, Travis C. Pratt, Jillian J. Turanovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Sentencias

Revitalizing Victimization Theory: Revisions, Applications, and New Directions revises some of the major perspectives in victimization theory, applies theoretical perspectives to the victimization of vulnerable populations, and carves out new theoretical territory that is clearly needed but has yet to be developed. With the exception of a handful of isolated works in the mid-twentieth century, theory and research on victimization did not come into its own until the late 1970s with the articulation of lifestyle and routine activity theories. Research conducted within this tradition continues to be an important part of the overall criminological enterprise, and a large body of empirical knowledge has been generated. Nevertheless, theoretical advances in the study of victimization have largely stalled within the field of criminology. Indeed, little in the way of new theoretical headway has been made in well over a decade. This is an ideal time to revitalize victimization theory, and this volume does just that. It is an ambitious project that will hopefully reignite the kinds of theoretical discussions that once held the attention of the field.

The work included here will shape the future of victimization theory and research in years to come. This volume should be of interest to a wide range of criminologists and have the potential to be used in graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses.

Part I

Revisiting Major Perspectives in Victimization Theory

1

What Ideas of Victimization and Vulnerability Mean for Criminological Theory: A Logical Appraisal¹

Christopher J. Schreck and Mark T. Berg

No criminologist disputes that the victim is a central actor in a criminal incident, yet theories about crime causation rarely permit this actor any role. In this chapter, we show that theories about offenders in fact contain an implicit internal logic that requires a theory of victimization. We will show how attention to this logic can reward theorists with a range of hypotheses about the nature and distribution of victimization, the interplay of offenders with their targets, and target behavior. We will not show that any given theory’s logic can be made to produce hypotheses that are supported by the findings of good science. Where this proves to be the case, it follows that criminology benefits by having a new tool for falsifying its theories of crime. We believe that efforts to derive theories of victimization in this fashion can revitalize interest in criminological theory, and encourage crime researchers to value and promote original research in topic areas that are scientifically important but that have been long neglected thanks to widespread uncritical acceptance that the target adds little to the understanding of crime’s causes.

To guide this task, we develop two distinct ideas that all criminological theories tacitly accept in one form or another. The idea of victimization defines whether a theory of crime endorses the view that victimization is an event with inherent qualities, and thus whether it is possible to have an a priori expectation that humans will be responsive to the threat and experience of victimization. This idea also determines whether the target has the ability to influence the decisions of the offender, and thus answers the question about whether the target merits any attention in a theory of crime. Theories about offenders also implicitly specify an idea of vulnerability to explain and predict differential risks of victimization across the population. We conduct a logical analysis to derive ideas of victimization and vulnerability from two examples of substantive positivist crime theory (cultural deviance and integrated theories) and contrast their claims against similar ideas generated from choice theory. Although our results favor choice theories, this chapter has a constructive goal that should appeal to theorists of all stripes: a demonstration of a process anyone can use on their own with their preferred theory.

Criminological Theory, the Victim, and Intellectual Orthodoxy

For decades, criminology seemed poised to incorporate the victim into its theories of crime. In 1958, Marvin Wolfgang published a landmark study showing that many victims of homicide had arrest records. Killers and their victims often were people of the same sort. Wolfgang’s timing seemed ideal, as the criminologists of the late 1950s worked amidst the greatest flowering of theory ever seen. Conceptual schemes destined to become classics had been coming in quick succession (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960; Cohen, 1955; Merton, 1938; Shaw & McKay, 1942; Sutherland, 1947), with more on the way (Hirschi, 1969; Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967). Moreover, Wolfgang’s contemporaries were not embarrassed to speak of the victim’s role in crime causation. Donald Cressey (1954), protégé and heir of Edwin Sutherland, conceded that “antagonistic or irritating behavior on the part of the victim” often preceded a homicide incident. Edwin Schur (1957) remarked that conmen exploited the dishonesty of their marks (see, also, Sutherland, 1937; von Hentig, 1948), and he made another interesting and prescient observation: “a probable influence on victim behavior is risk-taking.” Schur goes on: “businessmen are particularly likely marks,” and their victimization may owe to “certain values of the business community which seem to underlie the trend to what [C. Wright] Mills (1956) terms a ‘structural immorality.’” Crime scholars in the mid-20th century thus appeared to be neither prone to a romanticized view of victims nor, it seemed, noticeably prejudiced against the topic itself.

At the same time, however, the consensus also appeared to be that victims and their offenders, more often than not, were unlike one another. Sykes and Matza (1957, p. 665) are but one example: “There is much evidence that juveniles often draw a sharp line between those who can be victimized and those who cannot. Certain social groups are not to be viewed as ‘fair game’…in general, the potential for victimization would seem to be a function of the social distance between the juvenile delinquent and others…‘don’t steal from friends’ or ‘don’t vandalize a church of your own faith.’” The leading theories of victims of that time took a similar line, with their categories often describing victims who did not resemble offenders (Schafer, 1968; von Hentig, 1948). Wolfgang’s work cast doubt on such ideas, suggesting that crime theories could profit from revisiting the matter. By the 1970s, large-scale data supplying the basic facts about victimization were becoming widely available. The first waves of the National Crime Survey—later the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)—confirmed that victims and offenders resembled one another socially and demographically (Hindelang, Gottfredson, & Garofalo, 1978). Forty years ago, Wolfgang and Singer (1978, p. 379) would regard the future with cautious optimism: “theory building will probably come shortly.”

Criminology, for reasons that will become clear later, had other plans. Until the 1990s, one would have looked in vain for any meaningful mention of the victim in any of the leading theories of crime (Akers, Krohn, Lanza-Kaduce, & Radosevich, 1979; Braithwaite, 1990; Moffitt, 1992; Sampson & Laub, 1993; Thornberry, 1987).² The few theories of victims to have lasting importance developed independently (Cohen & Felson, 1979; Hindelang et al., 1978). Moreover, by the 1970s, political advocacy had seized control of scientific discourse and promoted an idealized image of the victim, often attacking anything contrary to this image as “victim-blaming” (Best, 1997; Felson, 1991; Meier & Miethe, 1993; Straus, 1999). Realizing the vast opportunities for knowledge being lost, Meier and Miethe (1993) would urge the integration of theories of victimization and offending. Their efforts to inspire criminology, like Wolfgang’s, were futile. The victim continues to play no obvious role in recent published work on theories of crime causation (e.g., Agnew, 2014; Wikstrom, Oberwittler, Treiber, & Hardie, 2012) and only relatively lately have any of the important crime theorists made the effort to explain why victims and offenders are often the same people (e.g., Agnew, 2002). Crime theory textbooks barely mention victimization outside of their descriptions of routine activity theory (e.g., Akers, Sellers, & Jennings, 2016; Bernard, Snipes, Gerould, & Vold, 2015). Even a decade ago, the leading criminological journals attached low priority to work with any focus on victimization (Addington, 2008). If it turns out that one can logically derive all manner of testable claims from any given theory of crime concerning ideas of victimization and vulnerability, it becomes evident that criminology’s priorities are not simply mistaken but in fact obstruct the ability of the field to assess the validity of the theories it has created. That is to say, however convincing a theory seems to be at explaining the offender, its inability to produce a believable explanation about victimization constitutes falsification of that theory.

Positivism, Substantive Positivism, and Choice

Theories of crime are more than simply lists of variables and causal arrows; they are logical systems. The advantage of treating theory as a logical system is that by working from its ideas or assumptions the scientist has a foundation for making sense of emerging facts, sorting which of these facts matter and which do not, and then developing meaningful original research questions. Since the late 1960s, with the advent of social control theory (Hirschi, 1969), the most pronounced theoretical fault line in criminology arguably has been between two logical systems: substantive positivism and choice (Akers, 1996; Hirschi, 1996; Kornhauser, 1978; Roshier, 1989). In this paper, we limit our focus to a contrast of these systems. In so doing, we acknowledge working within the definitions of these as presented in Hirschi and Gottfredson (1990). We further acknowledge that each logical system allows the theorist the creative freedom to explore many alternative points of emphasis, far more than we can develop here. Substantive positivism encompasses the theories of the social science disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and biology, and we include integrated frameworks. Choice theory, for its part, includes deterrence theory, social disorganization theory, social control theory, routine activity theory, and self-control theory. For all this variety in the direction theorists can elect to go, logical systems nevertheless impose general rules for how one may approach the question of the victim. Put differently, as we will show, any assumptions a theorist makes about the offender immediately constrains what that theorist might say about anything relating to the target and even the very nature of victimization.

Before describing the important assumptions of these systems, we first should distinguish positivism from substantive positivism. Positivism is a philosophy that advocates the techniques of natural science when conducting observation (Bryant, 1985). This perspective requires all who make factual claims to submit high quality positive observational proof. Positivism thus refers to the method of inquiry and, over the last half-century, scientific research would show that Wolfgang’s findings were no accident of bad data. Offenders and victims clearly resembled each other everywhere one looked (Berg, 2012; Gottfredson, 1984; Hindelang et al., 1978). Those who self-reported much offending also tended to say they experienced a lot of victimization (Jensen & Brownfield, 1986; Lauritsen, Sampson, & Laub, 1991), and no reputable study has ever found anything other than a strong and positive relationship between an individual’s offending and victimization (Lauritsen & Laub, 2007). Indeed, both phenomena appear to have identical correlates (Lauritsen, Laub, & Sampson, 1992). Positivism thus is responsible for the basic facts of victimization that, we will argue, valid theories of crime causation must also account for.

Positivism is supposed to give scientists the tools to adjudicate between rival theories, but, in criminology, it became a theory whose basic principles would dominate criminological thought thereafter (Laub & Sampson, 1991). Substantive positivism, as Hirschi and Gottfredson (1990) called it, was the extension of positivism to matters of theory creation and had originally developed as a reaction against defects in early versions of classical thought (Durkheim, 1982 [1895]; Roshier, 1989). Social scientists rejected the classical idea of hedonistic utility maximization as “unproven” and pre-scientific; properly conceived theory would instead begin with the assumption that people had no nature at all. Acceptance of this assumption forces the theorist to look for the causes of human action in phenomena that are outside the individual’s control. Different behaviors implied different causes, thus urging criminologists to prefer separate theories for each discrete behavior—that is to say, substantive positivist criminology tended toward typological theories. While some of the more ambitious theories might focus on general causes of crime, more usually one will see theories of crime subtypes: violence among disadvantaged African Americans (Anderson, 1999), international differences in serious violence (Messner & Rosenfeld, 1994), white-collar crime (Sutherland, Geis, & Goff, 1983), child abuse (Azar, 1991), intimate partner violence (Jewkes, 2002), simply to name a few. This assumption of differential causes also predisposes the criminological theorist to perceive victims as a separate group from their offenders (e.g., Schur, 1957; Sykes & Matza, 1957).

It is beyond our remit to summarize the criticisms against substantive positivism; however, we should note that in Hirschi and Gottfredson’s (1990) view, thanks to its having appropriated the external features and jargon of science, the perspective benefits in that it appears attractive and reasonable. On the other hand, theories of offenders that conform to its assumptions pay a steep price in parsimony, accuracy, and overall usefulness (see, also, Kornhauser, 1978; Matza, 1964; Pfohl, 1994; Taylor, Walton, & Young, 1973). As we will show, these problems reappear with any attempt to employ the core assumptions of substantive positivism to understand ideas of victimization and the vulnerability. These assumptions, it turns out, make very clear why the victim has for so long been of so little scientific interest to the “positivist” crime theorist—as well as why only the offender, or the offender’s motivation, can matter in the explanation of crime. We concede that such a position appears superficially attractive and reasonable, but this comes at the price of creating a logical trap that results in predictions about patterns of victimization and victim behavior that data generally do not confirm. This has serious consequences for the credibility of any such theories of crime, and exposes the speciousness of the sometimes vast evidence purportedly supporting them. We also found that theoretical integration, essentially a modern revival of substantive positivism, solves none of these problems.

Choice theories, by contrast, began as general theories of behavior that were applicable to any crime and, indeed, any action at all (Gottfredson, 2011). Choice theories perceive humans, whether they become victims or offenders, as active decision makers who are pursuing their own interests. That is, their actions are at all times understood as guided by the pursuit of advantage and avoidance of pain. The question the choice theorist attempts to answer is why something as seemingly advantageous as crime yet happens so infrequently, and so choice theories of crime therefore attempt to locate the most important restraints upon criminal action (Bentham, 1970 [1789]; Hirschi, 1969). We will show that it follows from the same assumptions that people are capable of independently reasoning what victimization means as well as its probable consequences. This awareness, in turn, incentivizes them to act from time to time, very often successfully, to make the passing offender do something else. Choice theory also recognizes that the ability to manage exposure to victimization is nevertheless variable, and thus endorses an idea of vulnerability to account for when people must reconcile a desire for security with competing desires to engage in other advantageous action. That is to say, unlike in substantive positivist theories, victims are just as scientifically interesting to the choice theorist as offenders, and a choice theory of crime has little difficulty accounting for basic facts about victimization. In the following sections, we develop the connections between the theoretical assumptions of substantive positivism and choice, and show how these lead to distinct and testable ideas of victimization and vulnerability.

The Idea of Victimization

The Substantive Positivist View

An idea of victimization is implicit in all theories of crime. Building from the source assumptions of the theory in question, one can construct the essential qualities of victimization and whether or not humans have an instinctive desire and capacity to respond to victimization or i...