What were these commentators thinking when they issued these sweeping denunciations of what they branded as victimology?
Why is this rela- tively new academic discipline being singled out for such harsh criticisms?
Evidently, those who condemn what they label “victimology” are railing at something other than scientific research focused on people harmed by criminals. The mistake these commentators are making is parallel to the improper usage of the phrase “sociological forces” rather than “social forces,” and “psychological problems” instead of “mental problems.” Victimology is just one of many “-ologies” (including such narrowly focused fields of study as volcanology, penology, or suici- dology, or such broad disciplines as sociology and psychology). The suffix -ology merely means “the study of.” If the phrase “the objective study of
crime victims” is substituted for “victimology” in the excerpts quoted above, the sentences make no sense. Victimology, sociology, and psychology are disciplines that adopt a certain approach to their subject matter or a method of analysis that main- tains a particular focus, but they do not impose a partisan point of view or yield a set of predictably biased conclusions.
It appears that what these strident denunciations are deriding is a victimization-centered orientation that can be categorized as the ideology of victimism (see Sykes, 1992). An ideology (such as conservatism or liberalism) is a coherent, inte- grated set of beliefs that shapes interpretations and leads to political action. Victimism is the outlook of people who share a sense of common victimhood. Individuals who accept this outlook believe that they gain insight from an understanding of history: of how their fellow group members (such as women, homosexuals, or racial and religious minorities) have been seriously “wronged” by some rival group (to put it mildly; viciously slaughtered would be a better way to phrase it in many historical cases!) or held back and kept down by unfair social, economic, or political institutions built upon oppressive and exploitative roles and relationships.
For example, in a well-known speech in 1964 (right before Congress passed civil rights legislation officially dismantling segregation), Malcolm X, the fiery spokesman for the black nationalist move- ment, adopted a victimist outlook when he pro- claimed (see Breitman, 1966) “I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism … victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy … I’m speaking as a victim of this American dream system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.” A victimist review of the history of African Americans up to the present would stress how the evils of slavery were “perfectly legal”; how Jim Crow segregation and institutionalized racism in housing, employment, education, and public accommodations until the 1950s were permitted by a Supreme Court decision; how lynch mobs rarely got into trouble for their extrajudicial
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9781337027786, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Ninth Edition, Karmen – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
F O S T E R , C E D R I C 1 6 9 2 T S
B O X 1.2 Some Striking Examples of “Victimology Bashing”
The context and then the statement denouncing “victimology”
Concerning male/female relations:
■ During a nationally televised interview, a critic of con- temporary feminism (Paglia, 1993) declared, “I hate victimology. I despise a victim-centered view of the uni- verse. Do not teach young women that their heritage is nothing but victimization.”
■ A collection of letters written to the editors of the New York Times (1996, p. E8) was published under the headline “What women want is a lot less victimology.”
■ A reviewer (Harrop, 2003) of a book about the difficul- ties facing boys wrote, “The art of victimology requires three easy steps: (1) Identify a group suffering real or perceived injustices. (2) Exaggerate the problem. (3) Blame the problem on a group you don’t like. Conserva- tives have long condemned the “victimology industry” as a racket, especially when practiced by women and minorities. As it happens, conservatives also play the game, and very well indeed…. The latest victimized group seems to be American boys.”
■ A political analyst subtitled her provocative article about an alleged “Campus Rape Myth” as “The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology, and university approved sex toys” (MacDonald, 2008a).
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