Early Research on Victimology
Most of the early research into victimization looked at victim precipitation, the role victims played in their own victimization. Researchers had proposed that while some victims were not at all responsible for their victimization, other victims played a significant role in their victimization. It also acknowledged that two parties are involved in the crime: the victim and the offender. Both are acting and reacting to a situation. Victim precipitation varies:
• Victim facilitation is the idea that a victim did something to make him or herself a more likely target for a criminal. This view is similar to victim precipitation. • Example: Someone who left their new cell phone on a table in a coffee shop while going to the restroom made it easier for the criminal to steal the phone. This does not mean that the victim is to blame for the theft, but rather that the victim facilitated the theft by leaving the phone unattended.
• Victim provocation is when the victim did something intentional that led to his/her victimization. • Example: The victim might have started a bar fight but ended up getting seriously hurt because the person he/she chose to fight was a better fighter than the victim. In the end, that person was the victim of an aggravated assault, but had that person never started the fight, they would have not become a victim.
The earliest research on victims was conducted by Beniamin Mendelsohn, Hans von Hentig, Stephen Schafer, and Marvin E. Wolfgang. Most of this research categorized victims by their level of involvement in their victimization rather than the harm or injury caused by their victimization. It’s important to be familiar with this early research because it reflects the social narratives we have about victims today, including how sympathetic we are toward victims and what society thinks victims deserve in terms of assistance and restitution.
Beniamin Mendelsohn
Beniamin Mendelsohn’s early work (1937) focused on rape victims. As a lawyer interviewing witnesses and offenders, he noticed that many victims knew their offenders. He began to group victim-offender relationships into six categories
based on the victims’ level of guilt in the victimization. He eventually expanded his view of victims to include all types of victims (such as victims of natural disasters), not just the victims of crime. He considered this broad view a new field and first coined the term victimology as an overlapping but separate field from criminology in 1956. He is considered the “Father of Victimology” (Dussich, 2006).