Recognizing the Paradigm of the Unknowing Victim and the Implications of Liminality

Abstract This article presents the novel conceptualization of unknowing victim (UV) and addresses ethical ramifications this status. Criminology victimology have primarily focused on knowing victims, but certain crimes occur without victim’s detection (e.g. sexual assault an unconscious victim). There is a critical liminal dimension to UV’s status: they are threshold between unawareness conscious awareness their status as victims crime thus situated brink experiencing harm through own discovery, or someone else’s disclosure, committed against them. We call for recognition UVs temporalities embodied experiences, argue that there imperative prioritize lived experience.