William G. Doerner

Remedying the Plight of Victims

Victims can employ several means to recoup some of their losses, including civil litigation and insurance claims. However, both of these require further financial outlay from the victim, and many cannot afford to use these mechanisms. State victim compensation is another alternative available in some places. The state compensates crime victims for their losses if they cooperate with the criminal justice system. However, many victims are not informed about these programs, so they do not access these funds. Recent increases in federal participation and funding of victim compensation may turn this around, and state victim compensation could become the primary source of financial aid to crime victims soon. This should also increase victims satisfaction with the criminal justice system, based on victim surveys—although such compensation is unlikely to alter public opinion about the system.

The Scope of Victimology

Restitution and retribution to victims of crime were specific ingredients in many early codes of criminal law. One rationale behind this response was to deter such behavior in the future. But once populations centered in large cities, such a victim justice system was no longer workable. Victims required the state to bring perpetrators to justice. Starting in the 1940s, victimology developed into the study of the relationship between offenders and their victims to increase understanding of the criminal act. Scholars such as Hans von Hentig, Beniamin Mendelsohn, Stephen Schafer, Marvin E. Wolfgang, and Menachem Amir have developed theories of victimology. The womens movement of the 1960s led to reform of a system that had dealt with sexual assault victims as if they themselves were the offenders. States enacted legislation to prevent child abuse. Some states have also passed victims bills of rights, outlining what victims could expect from the criminal justice system.

Victimization at Work and School

People assume they are safe at home, work, and school, so victimization in these places can be especially unexpected and traumatic. Employees and students expect that their employers or schools have provided a secure workplace or educational institution. Indeed, school systems, universities, and employers can be liable if they dont take reasonable precautions to provide a safe environment. Preventive measures and plans of action to prepare for emergencies involving victimization, including remedial actions in the event of a victimization and plans for aiding anyone victimized while on the job or at school, have been developed. But no one set of responses can work in all cases. The potential situations range from disgruntled ex-employees “going postal” and harming potentially large numbers of people they once considered colleagues in dramatic and all-too-tragic circumstances to sexual assaults by rapists targeting individual students on campus. Sexual harassment is another form of workplace violence that can be even more insidious because of victims reluctance to report such incidents.

Crime and the Elderly

In the study of victimology, the elderly are victims of the same crimes as everyone else. Furthermore, the “general crimes” committed against society have a greater impact when committed against elderly persons, who tend to be frailer, so their recovery from physical attacks takes longer and/or they may never fully get back to where they were before the crime. In addition, like children, the elderly are vulnerable to being victims of abuse and neglect. This maltreatment of elders is a relatively new problem in criminal justice. Victimologists are beginning to identify the problem, probe its causes, and offer some solutions. A number of theories have been proposed, among them intraindividual theories, intergenerational transmission of violence, situational explanations, stress, social isolation, symbolic interactionism, social exchange theory, and social attitudes toward the elderly. In terms of legislative protections, the Family Violence Prevention and Treatment Act and the Older Americans Act were passed in 1984. The Older Americans Act was reauthorized in 1993.

Measuring Criminal Victimization

Crime victimization measurement is accomplished through the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), an FBI-administered system by which police departments in different jurisdictions can exchange relevant information about crime. However, incidents that victims or witnesses opt not to tell police about are excluded from UCR figures. As a result, critics argue that the UCR grossly underreports the true level of crime in society. In the 1980s, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) was developed based on a report that examined law enforcements changing needs for data collection and analysis. Victimization surveys, on the other hand, involve contacting people and asking them if they have been crime victims, instead of relying on police reports or other official information. Outside the United States, in 1973, Great Britain started to collect information via the ongoing British Crime Survey (BCS), and in 1982, the Netherlands established one, and the Swiss began in 1984. Plus, there is the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS), which started in 1989.