At the heart of the second definition is Von Hentig’s controversial notion of ’victim proneness,’ which suggests that some victims actively contribute to their own victimisation process I.e. the victim is not just a passive sufferer at the hands of the offender. Indeed, Von Hentig’s rigid typology includes both social categories: (children, old people and females; the mentally disabled; immigrants; minorities and ’dull normals’) alongside emotional/personality traits: (the depressed, the acquisitive, the wanton, the lonesome/heartbroken, the tormentor and the chronic ‘loser’).5 Similarly, Mendelsohns’ idea of ’victim culpability’ (idem), includes a Six-fold typology ranging from the ‘completely innocent’…to the ‘most guilty’ (e.g. the injured aggressor) and makes a distinction between the ’deserving’ and ’undeserving’ victim. This notion of the ’Born victim’ reflects his deterministic viewpoint of the human nature and is overtly contentious because of its refusal to delve into any wider social issues which could be instrumental in finding out exactly why some people are more likely to be victimised than others. From Mendelsohns’ limited viewpoint, we can infer the importance of structural/societal factors when determining the true causes of victimisation (later introduced in the methodology’s inherent within the radical perspective).
The argument that a person may not be merely passive and can actively contribute to their own victimisation (inherent within positivism), is not only contentious, but due to the sheer abruptness of such a concept, would seem to inevitably create a gateway for an even more advanced development on the positivist agenda, due to our concerns with the explanatory factors behind this notion. The notion of victim precipitation can be defined as;
‘acting out with unwise haste…or exhibiting lack of due care or consideration.’6
Fortunately, with the increasing prominence of the plight of victims, and moves towards penal populism and retributive justice, the positivist methodology refuses to acknowledge the notion of the irresistible impulse syndrome I.e. the law of rape refuses to recognise provocation or seduction by the victim as a possible reason for mitigation of the offence. 7 Indeed, with the introduction of positivist methodologies, the law became more concerned with the offenders responsibility.
Due to their subject matter, the two most worrying adoptions of positivist methodologies are the investigations carried out by Amir and Wolfgang. 8 Indeed, Wolfgang’s research is based upon the police records of 588 murder cases in Philadelphia and concludes that in 26% of these cases, the victim had initiated the events that led to their death. Similarly, Amir based his investigation on the police records of 646 cases of forcible rape in Philadelphia, with the conclusion that 19% of the victims precipitated their own victimisation. These links to the controversial blame culture have little to say about the broader perspective since they are only concerned with purely individualised factors (criticised by feminists in the context of radical perspectives), and detract any attention away from the state and its responsibility for how it has constructed our society. (criticised by left realists in the context of radical perspectives). Furthermore, we tend to associate the term ’radical’ with connotations of a extremist point of view; a term which would seem necessary so as to counteract the worrying and forthright viewpoints put forward by positivist researchers such as Amir and Wolfgang (and their association to the paradigm of victim precipitation). The positivist methodology is clearly inefficient and is essentially too narrow to provide an adequate explanation of the patterns of victimisation. A radical approach was much needed.
The generalised assumptions created by the positivist reliance upon data collection (large-scale victim surveys such as the British Crime Survey 1972) largely displaced the use of police records and disclosed a non-random pattern of victimisation.9 However, in its quest for factors that might help to explain it, the positivist methodology largely fails. Indeed, the lifestyles approach is one method that has been incorporated by the positivist agenda to explain the patterns of victimisation. This includes an individuals’ ‘routine activities’ within the context of constraints such as age, sex, race etc. (ibid). The inclusion of these factors appear to demonstrate how the positivist methodology’s have started to develop more plausible explanations for the causes of victimisation by finally beginning to acknowledge structural factors (albeit in a limited and superficial sense). Also, criticism must be vented regarding the idea that factors such as the amount of time spent in public places, the amount of time spent with non-family members and the extent to which a victim resembles the offender; all increase the risk of victimisation. Indeed, the rigidity of such criteria cannot be as clear cut as one would initially believe I.e. not all situations can be covered by this framework created by the positivist approach and its stereotyping attempts to classify all patterns of victimisation. This is particularly notable in crimes such as rape and domestic violence, where it is often the ’nearest and dearest’ of the victims who are responsible and where wider structural factors have constrained womens’ lifestyle choices so as to add fuel to these kinds of ’hidden crime.’ Women are often economically dependent upon their partner, they may hope their partner will change their behaviour, or they may simply have nowhere else to go/lack of alternative accommodation.10 Radical perspectives subsequently presented an advance on the positivist agenda by declaring that maybe we should be looking more at how our society has been ordered and the responsibility of the state, if we want to find out the true causes of victimisation. Also, the series of false assumptions premised on the lifestyle approach seem to add insult to injury to some victims of crime. Sweeping statements that most crimes take place in the public domain and are more likely to be committed by strangers; does not hold true of violence involving women and children, nor do the ideas that victims are always aware of their victimisation and may change their lifestyle so as to reduce the risk.
To conclude on the positivist agenda, whilst the lifestyle approach relates closely to the ‘real world’ in the sense that it is empirically grounded, it fails to acknowledge unconventional offences and ’hidden crime,’ and neglects the unequal power relations between men and women. Whilst successfully switching the criminological focus to victims and highlighting the patterns of victimisation, the positivist approach fails to accurately portray the true causes of these patterns, so in fact, only represents a statistical methodology. A radical approach aims to penetrate the heart of the problem I.e. the ‘real’ explanation of these patterns.
Radical perspectives within victimological explanations contrast with positivist approaches, due to their refusal to acknowledge the positivists’ ’individualised’ approach. Indeed, more emphasis is placed on the need to look at the political, economic and social context of victims. Radical perspectives investigate how the role of the state and the way that society is organised contribute to our understandings of victimisation. 11 Radical perspectives are premised on the theory that patterns of victimisation are the product of structural inequalities (ignored by positivism), as opposed to the actions/attributes of individuals. Therefore, this theory is so fundamental in amending and criticising the positivist approach. The state selectively labels some harms as criminal but ignores others and may even mystify others. This draws attention to the fact that the positivist approach favours the government and the state, whereas the fundamental nature of radical perspectives seeks to expose the states’ role in the causes of victimisation, as opposed to blaming the victims. This viewpoint may be deemed as being radical because it is politically contentious in the sense that it takes a more positive step to broaden the positivist agenda, so as to draw more attention to hidden victimisation and to expose crimes of the powerful.
The left realist structuralist agenda seeks to uncover the explanations of ‘hidden’ victimisation within the context of domestic violence, child abuse and corporate crime. Domestic violence is explained by the presence of a patriarchal society whereby women are subordinate to men due to unequal power relations.12 Men dominate women through social, economic, psychological and physical relations and prior to the legislation of 1991, marital rape was not deemed to be a crime.13 Had it not been for the introduction of radical perspectives and their focus on structural explanations for victimisation (a patriarchal society), this law may not have been passed. With focus being made by radical perspectives to the structural inequalities within our society, marriage is now deemed to be a partnership of equals. Consequently, by acknowledging the imbalance of power between genders in the structural context, patterns of victimisations have been more accurately identified and thus measures (legislation) have been introduced to reduce the levels of victimisation.
The idea brought forward by left realists that women are socialised into accepting victim status I.e. that victimisation is a ‘social process’ and is a way of life for many women, suggests that merely looking at the attributes of victims (the methodology within positivism), is not adequate. Again, with child abuse, looking at individual attributes is largely unsuccessful. This is because structurally, children are physically and economically powerless and invisible (due to their subordinate status in family relationships) and any individual character attributes are immaterial when considering the likeliness of their victimisation. Corporate crime can be defined as:
‘Harm inflicted on consumers, workers and the general public resulting from corporate negligence, the quest for profits at any cost, and the wilful violations of health and safety and environmental laws.’14
A well known example is that of the Bhopal disaster (1984) which resulted in 3000 immediate and 20,000 premature deaths, following the toxic chemical leak from its factory in Bhopal. This case illustrates the concept of the invisible victim, (in the form of corporate crime liability) and is an example of how the law has failed to adequately acknowledge this kind of crime. Indeed, attention was drawn in this case to the languishing criminal charges against Union Carbide for culpable homicide, which did not amount to murder. 15 The procedural difficulties in establishing guilt tend to hinder prosecutions of this kind. So whilst identifying another one of the ’hidden’ crimes, case law suggests that difficulties may arise in any attempts to reduce the causes of this form of victimisation. The legal framework at present appears to give corporations wide powers while minimising forms of accountability. This lack of criminal liability can often lead to some company’s compromising their safety regulations in the interests of profit. This happened in the Herald of Free Enterprise sinking off Zeebrugge (1987), killing of 193 passengers and crew. The company encouraged the practice of not shutting the doors immediately in the interests of speed. The structural explanation offered by the radical perspective highlights the social construction of ‘accidents’ beyond human control and the ‘ideology of disaster’ and the consequent failure to recognise criminal contribution. By investigating into this ‘hidden’ crime, radical perspectives are exposing some of the real causes of victimisation by viewing victims as the product of structural arrangements I.e. how society is organised. Invisible victims can also be found within the context of the police, war, the correctional system, state violence, commercial exploitation etc.
In the Heyday in the 1970’s, many radical criminologists viewed crime as a form of ‘class conflict’ and saw offenders as victims. This idea was rejected by radical left realists, who criticised the positivists’ failure to take account of the victimisation process due to its rigid objective approach. The neutral standpoint inherent to the positivist agenda was also rejected by radical perspectives who instead preferred to adopt a normative/political standpoint. Within the context of national crime surveys, left realists admitted that most victims are just as marginalised as offenders. However, realists argued that crime and victimisation are a real problem but not for everyone. It is this viewpoint which led them to focus upon the role of local victim surveys. These surveys allowed patterns to emerge which conveyed the real effects in certain communities and the differential impacts (which were not easy to see with National Crime surveys). This allowed left realists to pay particular attention to the experience of victimisation on the working class, which could not be done as easily by using National Crime Surveys due to the fact that they are not representative of the distribution (‘intra not inter’ class phenomenon) Again, this illustrates why an advance on the positivist agenda was necessary in order to penetrate the core of the problem of victimisation.
The first British Crime Survey revealed that the ‘national’ average was likely to: be burgled once every 40 years, have the family car stolen one every 60 years, suffer an assault resulting in injury once every century, and to suffer a robbery once every five centuries. 16 These vague statistics have nothing to say about the realities of communities and individual’s experiences of crime, and hence present a minimal attempt to accurately convey the patterns of victimisation. More accurately, local victimisation surveys reveal that younger people are 13 times as likely to be assaulted as 45s, black people are twice as likely as others to be victims of assault, and women are half as likely as men to be assaulted. 17
To conclude, radical/structural explanations of victimisation move beyond positivistic explanations (e.g. victim ‘proneness’ ‘culpability’ and ‘lifetsyle’, and focus instead, on social characteristics such as age, class, gender and race and on the social system itself. Radical perspectives acknowledge that if people are trapped into positions of powerlessness by the social structure, this needs to be taken into account in explaining the process of victimisation.
Bibliography:
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Goodey, J (2005) Victims and Victimology: Research, Policy and Practice, Longman Criminology.
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Walklate, S (1989) Victimology: the victim and the criminal justice process, London: Unwin Hyman.
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Mendelsohn, B (1947) ‘New Bio-psychological horizons: victimology,’ American Law Review.
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Von Hentig, H (1946) The Criminal and His Victim, New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Amir M (1971) Patterns of Forcible Rape, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Wolfgang, M (1958) Patterns in Criminological Homicide, New York: New York University Press.
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Hindelang, Gottfredson and Garofalo (1978) - Empirical Foundation for a Theory of Personal Victimization.
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Mooney J (2000) Gender, Violence and Social Order, London: Macmillan.
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Spalek, B (2006) Crime Victims: theory, policy and practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (Chapter 3).
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Marsh, I (2004) Criminal Justice: An introduction to philosophies, theories and practice, London: Routledge. Pages 99-129
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Crime without punishment: Union Carbide, Bhopal and the failure of legal imagination. H. Rajan Sharma. Crim. Law. 2004, 147, 4-6.
- Hough and Matthew, 1983 (www.crimestatistics.org.uk).
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Jones, T. MaClean, B. and Young J. (1986), The Islington Crime Survey. Aldershot: Gower.
1 Goodey, J ( 2005) Victims and Victimology: Research, Policy and Practice, Longman Criminology. (Chapter one - Contextualising victims and victimology).
2 Ibid. (chapter four - Academic victimology, victim advocacy and social policy), page 99.
3 Walklate, S (1989) Victimology: the victim and the criminal justice process, London: Unwin Hyman (Chapter two).
4 Mendelsohn, B (1947) ’New Bio-psychological horizons: victimology,’ American Law Review.
5 Von Hentig, H. (1946) The Criminal and His Victim, New Haven: Yale University Press.
6 Amir M (1971) Patterns of Forcible Rape, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Also; Wolfgang, M. (1958) Patterns in Criminological Homicide, New York: New York University Press - Victim-Precipitated Forcible Rape.
7 Ibid. at Chapter 15, pages 259-276
8 Ibid. Also; Wolfgang, M. (1958) Patterns in Criminological Homicide, New York: New York University Press.
9 Hindelang, Gottfredson and Garofalo (1978) - Victims of personal Crime.
10 Mooney J (2000) Gender, Violence and Social Order, London: Macmillan.
11 Spalek, B (2006) Crime Victims: theory, policy and practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (Chapter 3).
12 Marsh, I (2004) Criminal Justice: An introduction to philosophies, theories and practice, London: Routledge. Pages 99-129.
13 The marital rape exemption was abolished in England and Wales in 1991 by the House of Lords; R v R [1991] 4 All E.R. 481.
15 Crime without punishment: Union Carbide, Bhopal and the failure of legal imagination. H. Rajan Sharma. Crim. Law. 2004, 147, 4-6.
16 Hough and Matthew, 1983.
17 Jones, T. MaClean, B. and Young J. (1986), The Islington Crime Survey. Aldershot: Gower.