Victims Flashcards
What is victimology?
- The study of who the victims are, why they are victims and what can be done about this
What is a victim?
- Defined under United Nations
- A person who suffers physical, mental, economic or psychological harm through acts that violate the state
What is the traditional,media and statistical view of crime victims?
Traditional = Weak, innocent and vulnerable
Media = Female, white and middle class
Statistical = Male, young and ethnic minority
What is patterns of victimisation in social class?
- Poorest groups are more likely to be victims of crime due to high unemployment and deprivation
- Middle class fear being a victim
- Upper class report and investigate
What is the patterns of victimisation of age?
- Young people are more at risk of victimisation
- Teenagers = Assault, sexual harrasment, theft and abuse
- Elderly = Victims of abuse
What is the patterns of victimisation of gender?
- Women are more at risk of sex related crimes, DV and trafficking
- Men are more likely to be at risk due to violence crime
What are the statistics of domestic violence and rape?
DV =
- 1in 4 women and 1 in 6 men
- 89% of DV are men against women
- 150 people are killed each year
- Walklate found that police are beginning to take DV more seriously
- Hester and Westermarland found only 5% result in convictions
Rape =
- 90% are women
- 6% lead to prosecution
- 84% knew the perpertrator
- 70% occured in the home
What is patterns of victimisation of ethnicity?
- Ethnic minorities are more at risk of being victims of crime especially of mixed ethnicity
- This may be explained by social class, areas of social deprivation and age
What is the patterns of victimisation of sexuality?
- 8% of hate crimes were linked to sexual orientation and 0.3% linked to trangenderism
- The victims are are often females for transphobia through assault
- The victims can also be male for homophobia for harassment
What is repeat victimisation?
4% of victims are repeatedly victimised in one year
What is an evaluation of these statistics?
- Certain aspects of victimisation are absent from statistics of the Crime Survey due to within the last year, children and homeless, some are not asked about, some may still not be reported
What is social construction of victims?
- Who is counted as a victim is socially constructed as it depends on the attachment of the label
- Some deny their victimisation, some are denied, some do not know they are victims and some do not report
What is a critical criminological perspective?
- The states power to apply or deny the label can distort the extent of victimisation
- The state often sides with the powerful and does not define their harmful acts as crimes
What do Tombs and Whyte argue about social construction?
- There is an ideological function of htis delabelling to conceal the true extent of victimisation and it’s real causes
- It hides the crimes of the powerful and denies any justice
- Many crimes are left with no one to blame and leave the injured as non-victims
What do feminism argue about social construction?
- There is sexism in the CJS which means that most women who are victims of DV and rape do not come forward, those who do are trated as guilty themselves and denied formal victim status and justice
What does Hoyle argue the impact of victimisation?
- May suffer anger, anxiety, depression, fear of further victimisation, shock, panic etc
What is secondary victimisation?
- The further victim blaming from the CJS authorities after an original victimisation
What does Walklate argue about secondary victimisation?
- Court cases
- Victim Blaming
- Rape Trials
- Honour Crimes
What is positivist victimology?
- Mier defines positivist victimology as having three main features
- Identify the factors that produce patterns of victimisation
- Focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence
- Identifies how victims have contributed to their own victimisation
- Focuses on victim proneness which is the characteristics of a victim that makes them more vulnerable. Von Hentig identified 13 which implies that some people invite victimisation
- Wolfgang found that many involve victim precipitation which suggests the victims are actively involved or to blame for their victimisation
What is an evaluation of positivist victimology?
- Victim blaming
- It ignores wider structural factors that are more likely to make people victims
- Downplays the role of law not tackling crime efficiently
- Ignores that some people do not even realise they are victims such as corporate or environmental crime
What is critical/radical victimology?
- Based on conflict theories. The powerless are more likely to be victimised and not have this acknowleged which is the hierarchy of victimisation
- Factors such as poverty and patriarchy make some people more likely to be victims
- Marxists believe that poverty and inequality breed crime, more likely to be both a criminal and victim
- Feminists suggest patriarchy perpetuates crime against women
- Global power structures can commit crime which impacts everyone yet unlikely to see justice
- Zemiology must be studied to understand the true extent of victimisation
What is an evaluation of critical victimology?
- It disregards the role victim plays in bringing on crime themselves
- Realists argue that it isn’t a job of criminologists to criticise governments and police as this is not effective to reduce crime and help victims of ordinary crimes
