Victims of Crime- Positive and Critical Victimology
UN- defines victims as those who have suffered harm (including mental, physical or emotional suffering, economic loss and impairment of their basic rights).
Christie takes a different approach- the notion of “victim” is socially constructed. The stereotype of the “ideal victim” favoured by the media, public and criminal justice system (CJS) is a weak, innocent, blameless victim (such as a small child or old woman) who is the target of a stranger’s attack.
Positive Victimology
Miers defines positivist victimology as having 3 features:
It aims to identify the factors that produce patterns in victimisation- especially those that make some individuals or groups more likely to be victims.
It focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence.
It aims to identify victims who have contributed to their own victimisation.
Earliest positivist studies focused on the idea of victim proneness- they sought to identify the social and psychological characteristics of victims that make them different from, and more vulnerable than, non-victims.
Hans Von Hentig- identified 13 characteristics of victims, such as that they are likely to be female, elderly or “mentally subnormal”.
The implication is that the victims in some sense “invite” victimisation by being the kind of person that they are.
This can also include lifestyle factors such as victims who ostentatiously display their wealth.
Wolfgang’s study in 1958- studied 588 homicides in Philadelphia- found that 26% involved “victim precipitation”- the victim triggered the events leading to the homicide, for instance by being the first to use violence.
He found that this was often the case where the victim was male and the perpetrator female.
Evaluation
Brookman notes that Wolfgang shows the importance of the victim-offender relationship and the fact that in many homicides, it is a matter of chance which party becomes the victim.
Identifies certain patterns of interpersonal victimisation, but ignores wider structural factors influencing victimisation, such as poverty and patriarchy.
It can easily tip over into victim blaming. For example, Amir’s claim that one in 5 rapes are victim precipitated is not very different from saying that the victims “asked for it”.
It ignores situations where victims are unaware of their victimisation, as with some crimes against the environment, and where harm is done but no law broken.
Critical Victimology
Based on conflict theories such as Marxism and Feminism, and shares the same approach as critical criminology.
Focuses on two elements:
Structural factors, such as patriarchy and poverty, which place powerless groups such as women and the poor at greater risk of victimisation. As Mawby and Walklate argue, victimisation is a form of structural powerlessness.
The State’s power to apply or deny the label of victim. “Victim” is a social construct in the same way as “crime” and “criminal”. Through the criminal justice process, the state applies the label of victim to some but withholds it from others- e.g. when the police decide not to press charges against a man for assaulting his wife, denying her victim status.
Tombs and Whyte show that “safety crimes”, where employers’ violations of the law lead to death or injury to workers, are often explained away as the fault of “accident prone” workers.
As with many s assault cases, this both denies the victim official “victim status” and blames them for their fate.
Tombs and Whyte also note the ideological function of this “failure to label” or “de-labelling”.
By concealing the true extent of victimisation and its real causes, it hides the crimes of the powerful and denies the powerless victims any redress, adding to the dark figure of crime.
In the hierarchy of victimisation, therefore, the powerless are most likely to be victimised, yet least likely to have this acknowledged by the state.
Evaluation
Critical victimology disregards the role victims may play in brining victimisation on themselves through their own choices- e.g. not making their home secure or their own offending.
It is valuable in drawing attention to the way that “victim” status is constructed by power and how this benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless.
Patterns of victimisation
Class- The poorest groups are more likely to be victimised. For example, crime rates are typically highest in areas of high unemployment and deprivation.
The fact that marginalised groups are most likely to become victims is borne out by a survey of 300 homeless people conducted by Newburn and Rock.
They found that the homeless were 12 x more likely to have experience violence than the general population.
1 in 10 had been urinated on while sleeping rough.
Age- Younger people are at more risk of victimisation.
Those most at risk of being murdered are infants under one, while teenagers are more vulnerable than adults to offences including assault, s harassment, theft, and abuse at home.
the old are also at risk of abuse, for example in care homes, where victimisation is less visible, but in general, the risk of victimisation declines with age.
Ethnicity- Minority Ethnic groups (MEGs), are at greater risk than White people of being victims of crime in general, as well as of racially motivated crimes.
In relation to the police, MEGs, the young and the homeless are more likely to report feeling under-protected yet over-controlled.
There were 76,000 race hate and 6,800 religious hate crimes in England and Wales in 2019/20.
However, most incidents go unreported- the CSEW estimates there were around 104,000 racially motivated incidents and 42,000 religiously motivated incidents in 2019/20.
Gender- Males are at greater risk than females of becoming victims of violent attacks, especially by strangers.
About 70% of homicide victims are male.
However, women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence, s violence, stalking and harassment, people trafficking and- in times of armed conflict- mass s assault as a weapon of war.
Repeat victimisation- refers to the fact that, if you have been a victim once, you are very likely to be one again.
According to the British Crime Survey, about 60% of the population have not been victims of any kind of crime in a given year, whereas a more 4% of the population are victims of 44% of all crimes in that period.
The impact of victimisation
Crime may have serious physical and emotional impacts on its victims.
Research found a variety of effects (depending on the crime), including disrupted sleep, feelings of helplessness, increased security- consciousness, and difficulties in social functioning.
Crime many also create “indirect” victims, such as friends, relative and witnesses to the crime.
Pynoos et al- found that child witnesses of a sniper attack continued to have grief- related dreams and altered behaviour a year after the event.
Similarly, hate crimes against minorities may create “waves of harm” that radiate out to affect others.
These are “message” crimes aimed at intimidating whole communities, not just the primary victim- even more widely, such crimes also challenge the value system of the whole society.
Secondary victimisation- the idea that in addition to the impact of the crime itself, individuals may suffer further victimisation at the hands of the CJS.
Feminists argue that grape victims are often so poorly treated by the police and the courts, it amounts to a double violation.
Fear of victimisation- Crime may create fear of becoming a victim.
Some sociologists argue that surveys show this fear to be often irrational.
For example, women are more afraid of going out for fear of attack, yet it is young men who are the main victims of violence from strangers.
However, feminists have attacked the emphasis on “fear of crime”, arguing that it focuses on women’s passivity and their psychological state, when we should be focussing on their safety- i.e. the structural threat of patriarchal violence that they face.