Structural Causes of Victimization
One of the other more common theories around victimization has to do with neighborhood characteristics and their relation to crime and victimization. This is called the criminology of place or hot spots and was first discussed in the work of Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger (1989). The criminology of place looks at the characteristics of places where crime is more likely to occur and what makes these areas different from other places where crime is not occurring. Although it has been some time since this idea was introduced into the field, it is a promising area of research, growing in prominence in the study of crime and victimization. This idea draws from numerous theoretical underpinnings but also accounts for structural factors like social disorganization, which is the inability of a community to organize itself.
Crime occurs in certain places, as seen in this image of homicide hotspots in Chicago, tending to cluster in certain community. (Curman, Andresen, & Brantingham, 2014; Eck, Gersh, Taylor, & Ross, 200; Weisburd, 2015). This stability holds across nations and across crime type as well.
Image: Chicago homicide map, 2013. Author: Chicago Police Department https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2013_Chicago_Homicide_Map.png. License: CC-0
Living in these hot spots puts a person at higher risk of victimization, regardless of their daily routines and lifestyle choices (Browning & Erickson, 2009). Characteristics associated with these higher crime areas include residential mobility (when people tend to move in and out of an area), female-headed households, high density housing (apartment complexes in particular), a higher youth population in the area (Thompson & Gartner, 2014), and lack of a strong informal community to control their residents. Criminology of place represents one of the growing theoretical areas for understanding victimization as technology allows for more accurate mapping of larger amounts of data. It can be expected that this, as well as other environmental theories of crime, will continue in their prominence in understanding victimization.
Conclusion
This module provided an overview into the historical and major theoretical views for the field of victimology, along with major social movements that have significantly influenced how we view and research crime. In future modules, these concepts will be revisited, revised, and called into question as we focus on new areas of crime and victimization.