Classical victimology is not a great way of looking at victims. It's interesting in parts, and includes some ideas and approaches which are genuinely useful. But as a whole it's very ideological and rather outdated. To put it another way, contemporary
victimology is one of the more critical parts of
criminology - and classical victimology is a large part of
what it's critical of.
Flash back for a moment
to the "Ideal Victim". Imagine that you're in charge of paying insurance
or compensation claims. You don't want to pay out any more than you
have to, but you don't want to get a bad public image. The obvious
solution is to pay out to the victims who are closest to the Ideal
Victim model, because those cases will seem the most deserving. If you
only pay out to those cases, you can save a lot of money but the public
won't
mind. Nils Christie's great insight was that, the more we
think in terms of the 'Ideal Victim', the less attention we pay to all
the other poor so-and-so's who are victims of crime but whose faces
don't fit.
Classical victimology is, in many ways,
about all the victims whose faces don't fit; specifically, it's dedicated to proving
that their faces don't fit. A lot of classical victimology is - in
academic language -
highly controversial and rests on discredited assumptions. If you
go back to the 1960s and 70s, you can find very respectable academic
victimologists arguing seriously that men hit their wives because their
wives nag
them, or that a girl who gets raped after a night out has brought it on
herself. (The Accused only came out in 1988, and it was pretty
controversial even then.) These arguments rest on highly discredited
assumptions - to all intents and purposes, they're wrong. But they add up to a
certain way of looking at victims.
The key concepts associated with classical victimology can be seen as distancing devices, ways of blocking sympathy: victims are victim-prone, i.e.
they're pathologically vulnerable to crime; victims precipitate attacks
on them, i.e. they're self-destructive and neurotic; victims are part of
a sub-culture of violence, i.e. they're socially marginal individuals
with chaotic lifestyles. Whichever way you look at it, victims - most
victims - are not like us; we can reserve our sympathy for the
minority of victims who fit the 'Ideal Victim' template. Classical
victimology is about ignoring, or downgrading, or refusing sympathy to
the majority of actual victims of crime.
Having said all of that, classical victimology did give us some
useful ways of looking at crime. Once you drop the key assumption of classical victimology and stop seeing victims as a
problem - once you acknowledge that sympathy should be given, in
principle, to all victims - the broader 'toolkit' of classical
victimology turns out to have some quite useful things in it. We don't
now call people 'victim-prone' because we think they're weird and
pathologically self-destructive; nevertheless, it's a matter of
sociological fact that young males are more likely to be victims of
violent assault, that poorer residential areas are more likely to be
high-crime areas, and so on. Maybe 'victim-proneness' is a social
category, not a personal one. The idea of a 'subculture of violence',
handing deviant values down from generation to generation, seems a
bit melodramatic these days, but it's undeniable that
some people have more violent lifestyles than others. And so on. Even
victim precipitation could be a useful way of
understanding the sequence of events that leads up to a crime, if you don't use it as a way of blaming the victim.
One other thing: when we talk about either classical victimology or the Ideal
Victim, we very often seem to be talking in gendered terms - the
virtuous little old lady, the 'victim-offender dyad' of domestic
violence, rape and victim precipitation. Why do you think this is?
Next week: feminism, followed shortly by a revolution in victimology.
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