Write a 4-page paper review of the study of victimology in which you:
• Define victimology.
• Provide a brief history to include the victims’ rights movement, legislation, and current status.
• Discuss the role of the victim. Define victim precipitation, victim facilitation, and victim provocation. Provide examples of each.
• Discuss why it is important to focus on crime victims. Describe how focusing on crime victims might aid in crime prevention efforts.
• Identify three individuals who have contributed to the field of victimology. Ensure you pick individuals from different countries. Describe their contributions.
Support your paper review with at least three scholarly resources (textbooks, peer-reviewed journals, and government publications).
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Notes:
victimology is a branch of criminology that looks at the relationship between a person who has been hurt and the person who hurt them. It does this by looking at what caused the pain and what it is like. Victimology, in particular, looks at who the bad guys were and why they chose to hurt a certain person or place. They look at whether the bad guys were complete strangers, just acquaintances, friends, family members, or even close friends. When someone is a victim of crime, it can hurt them financially, physically, and mentally.
In the 1940s and 1950s, several criminologists, including Hans von Hentig, Benjamin Mendelsohn, and Henri Ellenberger, looked at how victims and offenders interacted with each other. They focused on how the roles of victims and offenders could be switched. These early people brought up the idea that some people who got hurt or lost things might be partly to blame for their own problems along with the lawbreakers. For example, some careless drivers made it easier for thieves to do their jobs. Drunk people acting recklessly in a bar often caught the attention of robbers, and some people who started fights caused them to get so bad that the person who started it was hurt or even killed. People sometimes said that women were partly to blame for misunderstandings that led to sexual assaults. This was more controversial. By carefully looking into what victims did, costly mistakes could be found and ways to cut down on risks could be found. Also, people like defense attorneys who pointed out that the people who got hurt were partly to blame for what happened tended to argue for lessening the punishment of the people who did wrong.
At first, the focus of the field was on how much the victim was to blame. However, by the 1970s, studies were being done to stop people from becoming victims, improve how the police and courts deal with complainants, and speed up recovery. Other fields of study, especially psychology, social work, sociology, economics, law, and political science, add to the field of victimology. Lawyers, people who work in criminal justice, counselors, therapists, and medical professionals are the ones who actually help people. Victimologists, on the other hand, study what kinds of help hurt people need and how well efforts to make them “whole again” financially and emotionally work. Most research has been done on murder, rape, spousal abuse, elder abuse, child abuse, and kidnapping victims, but whole groups of victims who were once forgotten have been rediscovered (e.g., people with disabilities that make them unusually vulnerable and targets of workplace violence, hate crimes, and terrorist attacks). Other groups have also been found and protected, like people who have had their identities stolen.
One of the main goals of victimology has been to find and measure how often different types of victimization happen, like stalking, date rape, and carjacking. Some research has tried to figure out why the chances of being a violent victim vary so much from one group to the next, especially by age, gender, social class, race, ethnicity, and where someone lives (mostly as a result of exposure to dangerous persons because of routine activities as well as lifestyle choices). Victimologists are also interested in how the legal system treats victims who testify for the government. For example, detectives in specialized squads, victim-witness Helpance programs run by the offices of prosecutors, and state-run financial compensation programs are all examples of how the legal system treats victims who testify for the government. Victimologists have found that the interests and needs of people who have been hurt have often been ignored in the past. However, these needs are now being met because the victims’ rights movement has won concessions that give victims more power in the justice system.
Victimologists have looked at the many projects that advocacy and self-help groups (like shelters for battered women and rape crisis centers) have started since the 1970s, as well as the laws that have given victims more say in how their cases are handled (e.g., over such matters as sentencing and parole). The field also looks at how the media, businesses that sell protective products and services, and political groups that push for “pro-victim” reforms and laws react to the plight of victims. Also, victimologists study the urge toward vigilantism as a way to get revenge for wrongs done in the past, as well as the opposite tendency, which is a willingness to accept restitution as a condition for mutual reconciliation and is the basis of the restorative justice paradigm. Restorative justice uses mediation, negotiation, dialogue, and compromise to get everyone in a community to agree that the person who did wrong must take responsibility for what they did and make real efforts to help the people who were hurt and make things right again.
