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The News Media: Portraying the Victims Plight The news media deserve a great deal of credit for rediscovering victims. In the past, offenders received the lion’s share of coverage in newspapers and maga- zines and on radio and television stations. Stories delved into their backgrounds, their motives, and what should be done with them—usually how […]

Elected Officials: Enacting Laws Named after Victims Legislators engaged in the political process of enact- ing new laws have helped to rediscover specific groups and address their plight. Starting in the 1980s, federal, state, and local representatives real- ized that if they proposed a new law and named it after someone who had suffered terribly

Social Movements: Taking Up the Victims Cause Aside from suffering harm at the hands of criminals, victims as a group may have very little else in com- mon. They differ in terms of age, sex, race/ethnic- ity, religion, social class, political orientation, and many other important characteristics. Therefore, it has been difficult to organize them

THE DISCOVERY, DECLINE, AND REDISCOVERY OF CRIME VICTIMS Each law that prohibits a certain act as being harm- ful defines the wrongdoer as a criminal subject to punishment and at the same time specifies that the injured party is a victim deserving some sort of redress. The laws forbidding what are now called street crimes—murder,

Questions to Spur the Development of Survivorology How can the concept of “survivor” be operationalized so that it is not too restrictive and yet not too inclusive? What is resilience, and how can it be measured as a matter of degree? What is recovery, and how can it be measured as a matter of degree?

SURVIVOROLOGY: TOWARD A MORE INSPIRING AND UPBEAT TRAJECTORY WITHIN VICTIMOLOGY Some people who have been seriously harmed by criminals prefer to be called survivors rather than victims because of the term’s positive connotations— that they are rebounding are exercising “agency” to take charge of their lives and demonstrating their resiliency to adversity. They see the

RECOGNIZING EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOR UNDER VERY DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES Criminologists generally study people who are labeled as “predators” and “convicts” because of the most antisocial and harmful acts they are known to have committed. Those who are sympa- thetic to offenders as troubled souls argue that people should not be judged solely by the worst things they

Gather Evidence to Test Hypotheses See if this criminal activity is linked to other social problems and whether effective responses have been devised and implemented. Now that the term road rage is firmly entrenched in the vocabulary of law, criminal justice, and journalism, discus- sions of the problem generate many interesting hypotheses. For example, a

Investigate How Victims Are Faring Zero in on the criminal justice system’s response. Motor vehicle collisions are a major cause of injury, disability, and death, especially of young people. On a soci- etal level, vehicle crashes are a major source of shattered lives, emotional damage (including phobias, and in extreme cases, post-traumatic stress disorder), truncated

Measure the True Dimensions of the Problem The analysis proceeds by estimating the frequency of occur- rence of this sort of incident and examining the victim– offender interaction in order to draw evidence-based portraits of the typical aggressors and their usual targets, and of the amount of harm done. Unfortunately, chilling accounts often were laced