Victimology

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The victimology ( Latin victima , victims' ) and victimology called, is a branch of criminology , dedicated to the victims of crime is concerned. The subject of research is victim personality structures, the process in which someone becomes a victim of a crime ( victimization ), relationship structures between victim and perpetrator, the consequences for victims of a crime and the interaction between victims and social institutions (e.g. judiciary, media ) and its social environment.

In countries that have regularly carried out comparable victimization studies for decades, the decline in crime known from crime statistics is visible. At the same time, an increasing willingness to report was determined.

Goal setting

The task and goal of victimology is to determine all individual, social and societal structural processes from the perspective of the victim and to create preventive strategies from this knowledge.

history

The German criminologist Hans von Hentig (e.g. his most important work “The Criminal and His Victim” in 1947) began to systematically examine the victim . Hentig put the respective groups of victims in the foreground. Benjamin Mendelsohn (1947) looked at legal aspects. Henri Ellenberg drew attention to social isolation as a risk factor for becoming a victim.

In the 1960s, especially in the USA, the victim survey developed into a survey instrument used regularly and in many places. This led to a shift in research interest from the perpetrator to the victim.

In 1979 the World Society of Victimology was established in Münster.

Typologies of sacrifice

The basic idea is the assumption that some people are more likely to be victims of crime than others. Corresponding knowledge should be used preventively , ways of avoiding danger should be shown.

Hentig tried to capture the propensity to sacrifice by distinguishing between “family” (child abuse, parricide), “spatial-temporal” (weekends are more sacrificing than weekdays) and “age considerations”. Among other things, Hentig recognized that the professional position is important for the typology. B. Taxi drivers and prostitutes are more likely to dispose of them. Furthermore, Hentig postulates becoming a victim due to “greed for profit”, “own aggressive behavior”, “racial, ethnic or religious minority situation”, “reduced resistance” and “biological constitutions”.

Mendelsohn, on the other hand, puts the victim's behavior in the foreground, the grouping of victims is based on guilt-oriented and legal approaches. He differentiates between three groups of victims: "Innocent or ideal victims", "Victims contributing to the crime" - here he differentiates between provocative, willing or careless victims or victims out of ignorance. The third group (“victim who committed a crime”) includes those victims who commit the crime themselves, feigned self-defense as an example.

In his victim typology, Ezzat Abdel Fattah refers to the interaction between victim and perpetrator and classifies the victims according to their respective participation situations. Accordingly, he differentiates between:

  • Participating victim, participates in the act himself, e.g. B. the deceived fraudster
  • Non-participating victim, innocent victim
  • Latent or predisposed victim, e.g. B. through gullibility, naivete, superstition, isolation, weakness
  • Provocative victim, "actively provocative", e.g. B. Killing on demand; "Passive provoking" z. B. through carelessness or aggressiveness
  • Wrong victim, through own behavior: e.g. B. Pretending to be a victim (insurance fraud)

Newer victimological concepts also try to work out a possible victim contribution to the act.

The particularly predisposed groups of victims include: old people, because of their psychological and physical condition they are often not able to defend themselves, and these people often live in an isolated environment. Due to their naivety and helplessness, minors are often targeted by perpetrators. Due to their physical inferiority, women are also among the potential victims. Due to inadequate language skills and inexperience with the local living conditions, foreigners and minorities also belong to the predisposed groups of victims.

The Americans Thorsten Sellin and Marvin E. Wolfgang expressed that not only natural persons (primary victims), but also legal persons (secondary victims) and the state, as well as the government and society (tertiary victims), can become targets of criminal offenses .

The career model of victimization

Primary victimization

This is understood to mean becoming a victim directly through a criminal act. It can be of a material nature (property damage, property damage), physical (physical damage) or psychological nature ( fears , depression , feelings of guilt ). The damage relates not only to the victim, but also to the social environment.

Secondary victimization

The subsequent reactions of the social environment - police, lawyers, doctors, media reports, relatives and friends - can intensify direct victimization. This process is known as secondary victimization. Repeating the course of events is often perceived as psychological stress and extremely degrading. Shyness and / or mistrust often prevent reintegration into one's own environment. Indifference, negative expressions and moral reproaches from the social environment of the victim intensify. Repeated encounters with the perpetrator can also lead to secondary victimization.

Tertiary victimization

Defining oneself as a victim becomes part of the personality. Tertiary victimization is the product of the first two victimization processes. This often leads to " learned helplessness ". However, tertiary victimization can also have positive effects: (secondary gain from illness, pity as gain). Victimization can lead to the victim becoming convinced that the victim's situation cannot be prevented in spite of targeted and considered action; when danger threatens, these people tend to react passively.

Victim compensation and assistance

In 1963 New Zealand passed the first law on victim compensation. In 1976, corresponding legislation was also implemented in Germany. In the same year the White Ring Association was founded to support victims. The Victims Compensation Act came into force in 1985.

In 1983 the European Convention on Compensation for Victims of Violent Crimes was recognized by the Council of Europe's Council of Ministers in Strasbourg. In Switzerland, the victim assistance law has existed since 1993, as well as victim assistance .

Victimization Studies

While crime statistics document the work of the law enforcement authorities , victimization studies take a different approach. Victim experiences are determined in representative population surveys . A major advantage of this procedure is that a large part of the dark field can also be determined. A disadvantage is that for rare offenses, in practice the number of respondents is too small to obtain useful information. A survey also presupposes that people who were victims are willing to tell the foreign interviewer, which is often not the case, for example, with shameful crimes. If crimes are neither reported nor mentioned in victimization studies, they are twice as unreported .

Comparable victim surveys have been carried out regularly for decades in several countries or regions such as the USA , Scandinavia and England and Wales . Even if victimization studies have specific weaknesses, many of these weaknesses will be the same in each individual study and will not affect the meaningfulness of multi-year trends. Long-term victimization studies show - like crime statistics - an increase in the western world until the beginning of the 1990s and since then a decrease in crime , especially in the case of burglary , theft and violent crime .

Increasing willingness to report

Research in the US showed that the ad rates for rape and domestic violence began to rise in the 1970s and is substantially increased since the mid-1980s. One effect of this was that the apparent increase in violent crime in the 1970s and 1980s was overestimated and the recent decline was substantially underestimated.

Analyzes have shown that when changes in reporting behavior are taken into account, non-fatal violent crime in the United States fell by 51% between 1991 and 2005, while police data only show a 27% decrease. Similar patterns of increased willingness to report were also documented in England and Wales , as well as Scandinavia , other countries that have long had annual victimization studies.

In Western societies at least, the population has become much less tolerant of intimate partner violence , violence against women, and sexual offenses in general. Certain types of incidents became more likely to be officially registered as offenses because, on the one hand, the police wanted to prevent criticism of themselves for lack of feeling and, on the other hand, the police themselves are part of society and are inevitably also affected by the changed culture.

The level of cultural tolerance has changed at least since the 1960s. Behavior reported to the police today was often seen in the past as unfriendly, undesirable or socially unacceptable, but not as a criminal.

Victimization studies in different countries

England and Wales

Crime victims in England and Wales from 1982 to 2016. Figures in 1000 cases.

England and Wales is a region with common jurisdiction within the United Kingdom . The national statistics office has been conducting victimization studies here at regular intervals since 1982. Randomly selected people are asked whether and, if so, in what form they became victims of crime in the past year.

When analyzing long-term trends, the changing social tolerance level can have a distorting effect. In particular, cases of bodily harm and sexual assault are more likely to be classified as criminal today than it was decades ago.

The trend over time shows a steady increase up to the peak in 1995. After that, the numbers fell almost continuously. Excluding credit card fraud and computer fraud , the number of victims fell by a total of 68% from 1995 to 2019. The decrease in violent crime was 70%, that of robbery was 48% and that of theft was 68%.

Germany

Proportion of the population of the Federal Republic of Germany who were victims of personal offenses in the last twelve months (values ​​from 2017) (prevalence rate)

The first periodic safety report was published in 2001 and the second in 2006. These reports summarized the results of various crime statistics and victimization studies. However, due to their systematics, these studies are only comparable to a limited extent. Although there is a large number of unreported cases , there is an increasing willingness to report, especially in the case of violence against women .

The German Victimization Survey (DVS) was carried out in 2012 and 2017 . These studies were collected nationwide and representative of the entire resident population aged 16 and over. In the future, it should be repeated at shorter intervals and designed in such a way that the results can be compared with one another, so that trends can be clearly identified.

In each of the two DVS, over 30,000 people were questioned over a period of six months in the form of computer-aided telephone interviews. The conversations lasted about 20 minutes on average. People with a Turkish and Russian migration background were also questioned specifically , as these two groups represent the largest groups of migrants, in order to record their different victim experiences.

Advertisement rates for personal victim experiences within the last twelve months (2017) in the Federal Republic of Germany

The DVS surveys asked about victim experiences of the following crimes: various types of theft, fraud, misuse of payment cards, computer crime, robbery and bodily harm. For several reasons, the results cannot be directly compared with those of the police crime statistics .

The only statistically significant change between the two survey waves was an increase in robbery from 0.7% to 1%. In 2012, no questions were asked about victim experience for computer fraud.

Men were more victims than women. People with a migration background were much more likely to be victims of goods and service fraud, malware and bodily harm.

Advertisement rates for household-related victim experiences within the last twelve months (2017) in the Federal Republic of Germany

In 2017, prejudice-based bodily harm was also recorded. 1.5% of people over the age of 16 living in Germany were victims of this during the reporting period. The main reasons were social status (0.6%), origin (0.5%) and gender identity (0.4%) .

For personal victim experiences, the reporting rate is below 50%, for household-related experiences between 50 and 100%. The lowest reporting rate of the surveys was with 10% for fraud, the highest with almost 100% for vehicle theft . In the case of household-related victim experiences, the question was asked whether “you or someone else in your household” had been victimized.

Special legal historical aspects

See also

literature

Books

Magazines

Victimology and Victim Rights (VOR) . Series of publications by the Weisser Ring Research Association. Studienverlag, Innsbruck, Vienna 2004.

items

Web links

Wiktionary: victimology  - explanations of meanings, origins of words, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Michael Tonry: Why Crime Rates Are Falling Throughout the Western World, 43 Crime & Just. 1 (2014). P. 6 , accessed on June 6, 2019 (English).
  2. ^ Ezzat A. Fattah and Vincent F. Sacco: Crime and victimization of the elderly. Springer, New York 1989, ISBN 0-387-96973-X .
  3. ↑ Michael Gottfredson: Victims of crime. The dimensions of risk. Stationery Office Books, London 1984, ISBN 0-11-340775-0 .
  4. ^ Mike Hough, The Impact of Victimization. Findings of the British Crime Survey. In: Victimology. 10, 1985, pp. 488-497.
  5. ↑ a b c Michael Heller: I. Viktimologie - The victim in the center. (PDF) In: Socially deviant behavior. 9th session: Criminological aspects of deviant behavior. 2007, accessed December 4, 2008 .
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Lebe: Viktimologie - The doctrine of the victim - Development in Germany. Phenomenological development of the concept of victim . In: Berlin Forum for Violence Prevention . No. 12 , 2003, p. 8-19 ( PDF ).
  7. ↑ a b c victimization. Kriminologie-Lexikon Online, Ed .: Chair for Criminology, Criminal Policy and Police Science at the Ruhr University Bochum Professor Dr. Thomas Feltes and Institute for Criminology at the University of Tübingen Professor Dr. Hans-Jürgen Kerner, www.krimlex.de (archive) . Also: Hans J. Kerner, Thomas Feltes, Frank Hofmann, Helmut Janssen, Dieter Kettelhöhn: Kriminologie-Lexikon (basics of criminalistics). 4th edition, Hüthig Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7832-0989-7 .
  8. ↑ Michael Tonry: Why Crime Rates Are Falling Throughout the Western World, 43 Crime & Just. 1 (2014). P. 7 , accessed on June 6, 2019 (English).
  9. ^ Crime in England and Wales: year ending Dec 2016 .
  10. ^ Crime in England and Wales: year ending June 2019 . The numbers are from Table 2a: Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) incidence rates and numbers of incidents for year ending June 2019 and percentage change , accessed on December 1, 2019
  11. ↑ a b Federal Criminal Police Office: German Victimization Survey 2017. p. 18 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Federal Ministry of the Interior, Federal Ministry of Justice: Second Periodical Security Report, long version. P. 17 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Federal Ministry of the Interior, Federal Ministry of Justice: Second Periodical Security Report, long version. Pp. 120,121 , accessed December 16, 2019 .
  14. ↑ Bundeskriminalamt: Deutsche Viktimisierungssurvey 2012. P. 3.5 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Bundeskriminalamt: Deutsche Viktimisierungssurvey 2017. S. 6,8,9 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  16. ↑ a b c Federal Criminal Police Office: German Victimization Survey 2017. pp. 40,41 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Federal Criminal Police Office: German Victimization Survey 2017. pp. 12-14 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Bundeskriminalamt: Deutsche Viktimisierungssurvey 2017. pp. 21,22 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Federal Criminal Police Office: German Victimization Survey 2017. p. 26 , accessed on December 16, 2019 .