Victimology: meaning, history and philosophy

1. Meaning of victimology

Victimology is the scientific study of victims of crime: who becomes a victim and why, the relationship between victim and offender, the effects of crime on the victim, and the victim's treatment by the criminal justice system and society. It began as a branch of criminology; many now treat it as a discipline of its own.

It is usually divided into penal victimology, confined to victims of crime, and general victimology, which extends to victims of abuse of power, accidents, disasters and human rights violations. The UN Declaration of 1985 covers both crime and abuse of power.

2. Who is a victim

The UN Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, 1985 (General Assembly resolution 40/34) defines victims as persons who, individually or collectively, have suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that violate the criminal law of a State. A person is a victim regardless of whether the perpetrator is identified, apprehended, prosecuted or convicted, and of the family relationship between them. The term includes the immediate family or dependants of the direct victim and persons who suffered harm in intervening to help.

Indian law follows that approach. Section 2(1)(y) BNSS (old section 2(wa) CrPC, added in 2009) defines a victim as a person who has suffered any loss or injury caused by reason of the act or omission of the accused person, and includes the guardian or legal heir of such victim. Victims may be primary (the person directly harmed), secondary (family members), or tertiary (the community, as with terrorism).

3. History

• The golden age of the victim: in early societies the victim and his kin controlled the response to crime; punishment was private revenge or composition (payment to the victim's family), as in the Anglo-Saxon wergild, the Islamic diya and Kautilya's fines payable to the injured.
• Decline: as the State took over prosecution, crime became an offence against the King's peace, fines went to the State, and the victim was reduced to a witness.
• Hans von Hentig, The Criminal and His Victim (1948): argued that the victim often shapes the crime, and classified victims by vulnerability: the young, the female, the old, the mentally defective, immigrants, minorities, the depressed, the acquisitive, the wanton, the lonesome and heart-broken, the tormentor, and the blocked or fighting victim.
• Benjamin Mendelsohn, often called the father of victimology, coined the term in the late 1940s and classified victims by their degree of guilt: the completely innocent victim; the victim with minor guilt (through ignorance); the victim as guilty as the offender (the voluntary victim); the victim more guilty than the offender (the provoker); the most guilty victim (the aggressor killed in self-defence); and the simulating or imaginary victim.
• Marvin Wolfgang, Patterns in Criminal Homicide (1958): introduced victim precipitation, finding that in about a quarter of the Philadelphia homicides he studied, the victim had been the first to use force.
• Stephen Schafer, The Victim and His Criminal (1968): proposed functional responsibility, the victim's duty not to provoke, and argued strongly for restitution by the offender.
• Menachem Amir, Patterns in Forcible Rape (1971): applied victim precipitation to rape and was sharply criticised by feminist scholars for blaming the victim. That criticism helped turn victimology towards victims' rights.
• The victims' movement: Margery Fry's campaign in England in the 1950s led to state compensation schemes (New Zealand 1963, Britain 1964, California 1965); the women's movement produced rape crisis centres and shelters; the First International Symposium on Victimology was held in Jerusalem in 1973 and the World Society of Victimology was founded in 1979; the movement culminated in the UN Declaration of 1985.

4. Theories of victimisation

• Victim precipitation (Wolfgang, Amir): the victim's conduct triggers the offence. Useful for homicide and assault; dangerous when extended to sexual offences.
• Lifestyle theory (Hindelang, Gottfredson and Garofalo, 1978): the risk of victimisation depends on how much time a person spends in public places, at night, among likely offenders.
• Routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979): a crime occurs when a motivated offender and a suitable target meet in the absence of a capable guardian.
• Critical or radical victimology: asks why some harms, such as corporate crime, State violence and domestic abuse, are not treated as victimisation, and links victimisation to power and inequality.

The role of the victim in crime is therefore studied at three points: before the crime (vulnerability and precipitation), during it (resistance, provocation), and after it (reporting, cooperation with the police and prosecution, and the experience of the trial).

5. Secondary victimisation

The victim is harmed a second time by the system: insensitive police questioning, repeated appearances, hostile cross-examination, delay, publicity, and lack of information. The concept explains much of modern victim law: in camera trials, protection of identity, vulnerable witness deposition centres, and the right to information about the case.

6. The philosophy of victimology

The underlying claims are three. First, crime is a wrong against a person as well as against the State, so the person harmed has an interest the system must recognise. Second, the State, which has taken over prosecution and forbidden private revenge, owes the victim something in return: protection, information, a voice, and compensation where the offender cannot pay. Third, justice is incomplete if the offender is punished but the victim is left uncompensated and unheard. The syllabus objective states the consequence: a move from an accused-centric to a victim-centric approach, balanced so that the accused's fair trial rights are not lost.

How this is examined

“Development of victimology” (February 2025, short note); “Victimology” (October 2023, short note); “Crime victim” and “Role of victims in crime” (August 2024, short notes); “Discuss history and philosophy of victimology” (October 2023, 10 marks). For a history essay, use section 3 in order and finish with section 6. For “crime victim”, sections 2 and 5. For “role of victims”, the typologies and section 4.