Sociology: Victimology

-Physical and mental effects.

-Restrictions over movements - Feminists highlight the ways that women have been controlled by fear of violence.

-Fear - plays into a whole industry built around security.

-Secondary or double victimisation - often experienced by women who are judged for being the victim of sexual crime.

-This represents a fall of 66% since crime peaked in 1995.

-The fall in overall crime has been mirrored across the vast majority of crime types including violent crime, theft and burglary.

-Violent crime has declined 66% since 1995, meaning that whereas 5 in every 100 adults were violently victimised 2 decades ago, the figure is just 2 in 100 today.

-Domestic burglary has dropped 69% since the mid-1990s, meaning households are 4 times less likely to be burgled today than they were in 1995.

-The most dramatic falls in crime occurred in the 10 year period between 1995 and 2005 (8 of which under a Labour Government)

-In 2014/15 there were approximately 1.3 million violent crimes, 4 million thefts including 785,000 burglaries, 1.3 million incidences of criminal damage and 90,000 robberies.

-Research conducted by victim surveys on a nationally representative sample of victims of crime found that 61% of victims were affected by a crime psychologically or personally.

-Some of the most common problems reported by victims following the crime were anxiety (22%), loss of confidence (21%), insomnia (19%), crying (16%), reduced social life (14%), fear or anger (13%) and financial hardship (11%).

-In 10% of incidents, the crime impacted on the victims' family and in 22% of cases, victims changed their daily routines as a direct result of the crime.

-This focuses on how wider social issues and circumstances - including the CJS - produce victimisation.

-For example, social deprivation means it is the weakest and most deprived members of society who are most likely to be victims.

-Feminist writers suggest 'intimate crimes' like rape and other sexual assaults, and domestic violence, of which women are the main victims, are an aspect of male power in a patriarchal society, in which men are socialised into a sense of superiority over women, and sexual and physical violence are aspects of the network of male control of women.

-The higher rates of victimisation among ethnic minorities have been explained by under-protection by a racist police force that over-polices minority ethnic communities, which it regards as perpetrators rather than as victims of crime.

Evaluations:

-It ignores the issues of victim precipitation and proneness that positivist victimology identifies.

-For example, many people would regard burglars injured by householders trying to protect their property, or drug users who get ripped off by a drug-dealer, as responsible for their victimisation.

-Victim proneness: identifies the characteristics of individuals or groups that make them more vulnerable to victimisation.

-Victim precipitation: suggests that victims are actively involved in, or to blame for, their victimisation - for example, women making themselves vulnerable by dressing 'provocatively' or 'leading men on' in rape offences, or victims failing to lock doors or conceal valuables in cars, or carrying large amounts of cash around.

Evaluations:

-It tends to blame the victims rather than the offenders - in effect making the victims more responsible than the criminals themselves. Feminist writers, for example, have been particularly critical of suggestions arising from this victimology that victims of rape and other sexual offences or domestic violence are somehow to blame for making themselves vulnerable.

-It downplays the role of the law - this applies to the police and other criminal justice agencies in not tackling crime effectively and thereby contributing to victimisation.

-It focuses too much on the characteristics of individual victims - and does not pay enough attention to the wider structural factors, like powerlessness, poverty, unemployment, and corporate neglect, that often make some groups and communities more vulnerable to crime than others.

-It does not recognise that there are situations where people may wholly unwittingly become victims or are not aware of their victimisation - such as in white-collar, corporate or environmental crimes.