Early Study of Crime Victims

Victimology - Definition

  • Victimology is the study of victimization, including:
    • The victim/offender relationship
    • Interactions between the victim and the Criminal Justice (CJ) system (police, courts, corrections)
    • Connections between the victim and other social groups and institutions (media, businesses, social movements)
    • The decision-making and other behavior of crime victims

Early Victimology

  • Garofalo (1914) was among the first to mention that on occasion, victims may provoke an attack.
    • Garofalo, Raffaele (1914) Criminology. Boston: Little, Brown.
    • Afterward, scholars started thinking about the victims’ role in the offense.
  • Early discussions about victims were often found to be incorrect or problematic.
    • Often because early scholars either placed blame on the victims or said things that might be interpreted by others as blaming victims.
    • Although usually problematic in some way, we will briefly look at a few early authors to give some idea about the start of victimology with an emphasis on why some of the early ideas are problematic.
    • Often because they relied only upon “logical-proof” without following up with “empirical-proof”.
  • The earliest writings focused on victim typologies.
    • Hans Von Hentig (German)
    • Beniamin Mendelsohn (Rumania/Israel)
    • Marvin Wolfgang (USA)
    • Menachem Amir (USA/Israel)
  • Later writings focused on the role of the victim in violent crime.

Hans Von Hentig

  • Von Hentig was credited with laying the foundation for the academic study of victims.
    • But he never used the term “victimology.”
    • He claimed there were 3 broad types of victims:
      1. General Classes
      2. Psychological Classes
      3. Activating Sufferers
    • His classification scheme was mostly about “passive” categories – characteristics that the victim can’t “change.”

Von Hentig's General Classes of Victims

  1. Young
  2. Female
  3. Old
  4. “Mentally Defective”
  5. Immigrants and Minorities
  6. “Dull Normals”
  • Von Hentig claimed that some people were more prone to victimization than others.

Von Hentig's \"Psychological\" Classes of Victims

  1. Depressed
  2. Acquisitive
  3. Wanton
  4. Lonesome and Heartbroken
  5. Tormentor
  6. Blocked, exempted, and fighting

Von Hentig’s Activating Sufferer

  • A victim who has done something to become an easy target.
  • This is the closest of Von Hentig’s categories to those of the next early scholar we will discuss.

Von Hentig Missed the Most Important Victim Characteristic(s)

  • Victims and offenders are usually very similar to each other.
  • Similar ages, ethnicities, gender, socio-economic status.