Victimization Categories Flashcards
Natural Disasters such as earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, drought, famine, etc. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected by these disasters each year, losing their homes, belongings, and sometimes their lives. Natural disasters produce large numbers of victims, physical destruction, displacement, and human suffering.
Natural Health Hazards refers to biological diseases, poisonous vegetation, and other agents in the bio-physical environment can produce physical ailments and death.
Natural Predatory Agents such as wild animals, poisonous snakes, and insects also claim human lives, although technology has lessened the impact of these predators.
Natural Victimization
Intentional self-harm refers to intentional abuse of drugs or alcohol with full knowledge of the harmful effects of the action, self-inflicted injury, self-mutilation and suicide.
Negligent self-harm such as behaviors that cause harm to the self through actions, omissions, negligence, carelessness or recklessness such as getting into an automobile accident because of driving too fast, alcohol consumption, or experiencing physical injury from not wearing a seatbelt. While these incidents may be constructed as “accidents” the individual has taken/or not taken some form of action that has directly contributed to their personal harm.
Auto Victimization
occurs when modern technology causes human harm such as nuclear accidents or radiation, industrial pollution, and insufficiently tested products including drugs or genetically modified products.
Industrial or Technological Victimization
relates to harm caused through social and power structures in society. Wealth, power and social status create tremendous inequalities which incur disproportionate negative consequences for those individuals who are less powerful. Minority groups such as racial, ethnic, religious or sexual minorities, the poor, individuals with physical or cognitive disabilities and women oppressed through patriarchal systems are examples of groups who may be victimized through systems and social structures. Structural victimization may be overt, covert or nuanced. Some specific examples include: war, genocide, censorship, and exploitation of child labor. Some discriminatory forms of structural victimization are racism, sexism, ageism, and classism which may be reinforced by cultural biases and stereotypes.
Structural Victimization
relates to the creation of a “victim” as a result of a violation of a criminal offence as defined by the Criminal Code. This form of victimization is the most objective since it is encoded in law. Although criminal victimization constitutes a smaller portion of all victimization, it is a large category that encompasses many human behaviors or “crimes.” This includes violent crime, property offences, juvenile crime, sexual offences, organized crime, corporate and white-collar offences, and political crimes such as corruption, violations of international legislation or crimes against humanity.
Criminal Victimization
relates to social harms that are not covered within the other categories, and are not prohibited by law. This may include insults, bullying, controlling behavior, violence in sports, civil litigation, the effects of synthetic chemicals such as second-hand smoke, and so forth. Many forms of non-criminal victimization may be troublesome and damaging to individuals, but they typically exist without official means of recourse.
Non-Criminal Victimization
Conventional Victimology
Conventional Victimology reflects the positivist tradition of social science, with its emphasis on scientific observation and intervention. Early positivist victimology attempted to identify characteristics about victims that made them more susceptible to victimization, and worked to identify causal responsibility in victims for their own victimization. While these theories will be described later in the course, they have been critiqued as forms of blaming the victim.
Critical Victimology
Critical Victimology recognizes the role of power inequalities in creating victimization. It introduces radical, feminist and Marxist discourses that emphasize the oppressive nature of capitalism and patriarchy. These unjust systems allow privileged cultural and political influences to shape how laws are created, and ultimately to establish what forms of victimization are prioritized and recognized as legitimate within society.
