Investigate How Victims Are Handled
Researchers scrutinize how victims actually are treated by the criminal justice and social service
systems that are ostensibly designed to help them. Their studies can pinpoint the sources of tension, conflict, mistreatment, and dissatisfaction that alienate victims from the agencies that are supposed to serve them. Program evaluations determine whether stated goals are being met. For instance, many victimologists have studied how well or how poorly the police, prosecutors, judges, and family therapists are responding to the plight of abused children, sexually assaulted persons, and also battered women (see Hilton, 1993; Roberts, 2002; Hines and Malley-Morrison, 2005; Roberts and Roberts, 2005; and Barnett, Miller-Perrin, and Perrin, 2005).
Step 4: Gather Evidence to Test Hypotheses
Victimologists investigate all kinds of hypotheses: suspicions, hunches, impressions, accusations, assertions, and predictions. Like all social scientists, when presented with claims about what is true and what is false, their proper response is not to accept or reject the assertion but to declare: “Prove it! Show me! Where is the evidence?”
Testing hypotheses yields interesting findings, especially discoveries that cast doubt on common- sense notions (challenging what everyone “knows” to be true) and widely held beliefs. A major goal is try to sort out myths from realities.
For example, will the “dos and don’ts” tips offered on websites for women who are being stalked by ex-lovers actually work to reduce the risks of violent outbursts; or are these bits of advice largely ineffective; or could following these instruc- tions actually be counterproductive, escalating ten- sions and heightening dangers?
In order to illustrate each of the four steps that victimologists might follow when researching a particular type of suffering, a systematic analysis of the problem of “road rage” is presented in Box 1.5.