WHY EMPHASIZE RESEARCH?
As a branch of social science that closely focuses on how people behave and react, victimology must be research oriented. Yet, a criticism that often is voiced is, “Why spend all that time and money trying to establish what everyone already knows? The answer is that research is always necessary because “common sense” or “conventional wisdom” is sometimes mis- taken, and what people think they already know is incorrect.
For example, consider what happened in this real-life incident:
A 43-year-old grad student enters a classroom in which about 20 students had assembled a few minutes before class. Armed with a military semiau- tomatic rifle loaded with a 30-round clip, he points the weapon at his classmates and pulls the trigger, but the rifle jams. He tries again, but again the gun does not fire. The students realize they are under attack and drop to the floor, overturn their desks, and try to hide behind them. One courageous student shoves his desk at the gunman, enabling the others to bolt out into the hallway and then out of the building. The gunman flees too but is captured within an hour back at his home. (Asmussen and Creswell, 1995)
Everyone knows what happened in the imme- diate aftermath, since—unfortunately—violence on college campuses has erupted many times in recent decades. Students in nearby classrooms heard a commotion and set up makeshift barricades while the 20 distraught students raced away in a panic from the scene of the potential slaughter and imme- diately sought out counselors provided by the administration, right? Wrong! Only a few were openly emotional and cried. Most were in a state
of denial and milled around the entrance to the building kidding each other about their near- death experience, dismissing it as though it was trivial. No one called the campus mental health center right away. Most sought out the company of friends or hung out in nearby bars, according to two researchers who interviewed some of the students who thought they were about to die that fateful day (Asmussen and Creswell, 1995).
Next consider what is “known” about robbers: They single out targets that they consider weak and vulnerable, who are easy prey and are unlikely to put up much of a struggle to escape or to try to overpower and capture them. Therefore, it seems predictable that elderly ladies would be robbed much more often than young men, right? Wrong. Data derived from a national survey of the public carried out by a government agency, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, each year reveals that robbers go after teenage boys and young men much more often than older women.
As a final example, most people are familiar with the military’s problem of sexual assaults within the ranks (mentioned above). Few would be surprised that servicemen, especially those of higher ranks, exploit their power over the women in uniform to coerce them to submit to sexual acts against their will. But it may be quite a shock to most observers to discover that a little more than half of all reports gathered by researchers of “unwanted sexual con- tacts” imposed by men were directed at other men. Men therefore made up the majority of the targets of sexual assaults, although women suffered dispropor- tionately high rates (females make up only 15 per- cent of all members of the armed forces but almost 50 percent of all victims). Clearly, the findings of the Pentagon’s survey indicate that the problem of sex- ual violence goes far beyond the confines of male– female relations among enlistees serving in the army, navy, air force, and marines (see Dao, 2013).
Research is always needed because unexpected findings often are uncovered. Victimologists rely upon the same methods used by all social scientists: case studies, surveys and polls based on question- naires and interviews, carefully designed social experiments, content analyses of various forms of
W H A T I S V I CT I M O LO G Y ? 17
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
communication (like movies and song lyrics), sec- ondary analyses of documents and files, records of focus group interactions, and up close and personal ethnographic inquiries based upon systematic field observations.WHY EMPHASIZE RESEARCH?
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