From Victimology of the Act to Victimology of Action and the Resulting Impoverishment of the Scholarly Discipline of Victimology

In 1960 Sutherland and Cressey (1960: 55) maintained that Lombroso and the Italian Positivist School delayed by 50 years the progress of research on the aetiology of crime by considering crime as an individual rather than a social phenomenon in contrast with previous schools (such as Guerry & Quetelet). A similar criticism could be made of those victimologists who delayed the progress of theoretical victimology by turning a fledging and promising scientific discipline into an ideological battle field. The fierce criticism they levelled at the theoretical research in victimology had an intimidating effect on the pioneers in victimology who ceased to study the functional role and functional responsibility of the victim for fear of being accused of being prooffenders and anti-victims. Promising studies that analysed criminal events as interactions or situated transactions, the study of victim’s behaviour as a situational variable, the analysis of victim precipitation and other forms of victim’s contribution to the genesis of crime became almost taboo subjects! What else could the researchers do when they read Timmer and Norman’s (1984: 66) claim that “The ideology of victim precipitation blames neither the structure of society nor the individual offender for the crime. Instead it blames the victim who precipitates crime”? Their criticism was strikingly similar to what Franklin II and Franklin (1976) claimed, almost a decade earlier, when they argued that victim-precipitation reduces the offender to a passive actor who is set into action by the victim’s behaviour. It is easy to see that underlying those criticisms is a widely held misconception, namely the view that any attempt to explain victimisation at a micro level by reference to the behaviour of the victim is a deliberate attempt to blame the victim and to stress the individual rather than the structural causes of crime. The fallacy of this contention is clear. Victimology does not seek to explain crime but to explain victimisation. It does not seek to explain why some