Research Paper on Victimology

Introduction

Victim precipitation is a criminology theory analyzing how the interaction of the offender and the victim may contribute to the crime being committed. Moreover, it majorly associates with offenses related to rape cases, burglary, and assault. There are two significant examples of victim precipitations namely active and passive rainfall. In an incident of intense rain is where a lady kills her husband due to the violence within the family or the humiliation of an employee in public by an employer resulting in the employee pumping on the employer aggressively. Another example is a drunken man in engagement in eve-teasing a lady, continuously chasing the lady in trying to get her physically but in turn, get stabbed with a sharp object. Under passive precipitation, terroristic acts targeting certain communities or civil group as witnessed in Syria is an evident example. Another example of passive rainfall is the antagonizing power of men fighting over a lady, in place one party outweighs the other. The racial lynching by some of the whites toward the Africans is also an example of passive precipitation. Victim precipitation is also evident in a case whereby a victim is attempting to commit sodomy with his girlfriend, but in the process the girl refuses, the man then decides to strike her head occasionally using the fists till the lady chooses to grab a nearby knife finally butchering him. (Daigle, 2017).

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Victim facilitation the degree to which the victims carelessly, unknowingly and carelessly creates a vulnerable state for the offender to commit a crime. Victims make themselves susceptible to attacks by the prospective criminals by exposing themselves to risk unconsciously. The case of a six-year-old child named Etan Patz was allowed by the parents to walk to the school bus alone finally disappearing. Adam Walsh was also left intentionally by his mother and later discovered dead with his body maimed utterly. The free ride hitching is a typical case in the present day hence many people get killed quickly.

Victim's provocation refers to the situation whereby the person does an act that incites another person making him/her commit an illegal act. The suggestion is that without the behavior of the victim, the crime will not be undertaken. The offender is not responsible for the commitment of the crime. An example of victim provocation is an incident where a man decides to mug another man heading to home late in the evening from work, rather than handing the offender a purse, he ditched a gun shooting the mugger on the head (Daigle, 2017). The offender in the scenario is a victim but would not have shot the mugger in ordinary cases. Another incident of victim provocation can be traced from the encounter of Toorak woman in 2003known the name Julie who divorced from her husband. The husband visited her a month later in her flat; the lady then informed him that the marriage was over. Her former husband then antagonistically punched her face and killed her. He then transported the corpse burying it and confessed the act to the police.

There are a large number of significant figures who contributed to the field of victimology including Benjamin Mendelsohn. He was a French-Israeli lawyer born in Bucharest, Romania in April 1900. He obtained a degree in law. He served as a penal lawyer and gained interest in the victim which originated in his wish to pinpoint the contribution of the court to criminal activity. He investigated the correlation between the victims and therapist. He then introduced the science of the victim. He is known as the master as well as the father of victimology. He majored himself in the domain of victimology in the mid-1940s. His interest as an attorney was to discover the relationship between the criminal and the victim through conducting the interviews with the victims at the same time witnesses finally realizing that the victim and the offender knew each other well at some point. He categorized victims based on the degree of culpability. The classification entailed the following: complete innocent victims, in this category a victim bears no element of responsibility for victimisation because of nature, for example, a child, victims having minor guilt. In most cases, victims under this category are ignorant of the harm he/she gets exposed to their bodies (Hall, 2017).

The voluntary victim bears corresponding responsibility as the offender; a person entering a suicide pact is an example. Benjamin also categorized the most guilty victim; as a person victimised during crime perpetration as the verdict of a crime. There is also a victim more culpable than the offender; the victim tends to provoke self-victimization. Lastly, the imaginary victim fabricates an event with victimisation.

Hans Vons Hentig is a German criminologist who tried recognizing the vitality of investigating factors as to why a specific group of people is victims. In work, he was able to determine that the characteristics resulting in crime correspondingly was the verdict of victimization. He concentrated on the criminal-victim dyad, for instance, recognizing the joint importance of considering both the victim and the criminal. Based on the propensity of victimization, he suggested that the victims of crimes should be placed in thirteen categories such as the young females, the old, the immigrants, the depressed, the deranged, acquisitive group, the dull normal, the minority group, the wanton, the heartbroken, the tormentor and the fighting as well as the block. The above victims are targeted regarding their victimization characteristics (Hall, 2017). Majorly the young, old and female categories suffer victimization due to their ignorance and even taken advantage of them.

Doctor Marvin Wolfgang being a professor became the first individual to investigate on the victim precipitation in 1957. He carried out a classic study of homicides in Philadelphia beginning from 1948 to 1952. Marvin Wolfgang tested 558 murders to denote the extent victims precipitated their deaths. Indirect situations where victims were immediate, the real channel, he labeled as victim accelerated. Wolfgang together with his coauthor Franco Feracutti argued that the behavior was the result of violent subcultures where every individual in a conflict ideologically believes that the other party becomes violent. Wolfgang became controversial in a situation of high violence rates of violence among African Americans and the Southern white males (Walklate, 2017). He was known to be the director of research for a presidential commission on causes and prevention of abuse.

References

Cares, A. C., Franklin, C. A., Fisher, B. S., & Bostaph, L. G. (2018). "They Were There for People Who Needed Them": Student Attitudes Toward the Use of Trigger Warnings in Victimology Classrooms. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 1-24.

Daigle, L. E. (2017). Victimology: the essentials. Sage Publications.Hall, M. (2017). Victimology and environmental justice.Walklate, S. (2017). Other visions of victimisation and victimology. Handbook of Victims and Victimology.