Читать книгу Approaching Victimology as social science for Human rights a Spanish perspective - Gema Varona Martínez - Страница 6

Notwithstanding the existence of forensic applied Victimology (Turvey, 2013) mostly related to health or police science, today’s Victimology can be best described as an interdisciplinary social science concerned with the processes of victimisation and de-victimisation or recovery. In that endeavour, Victimology can be normative, with a focus on the values and rationales of the systems behind the construction of the notion of the victim and its responses to it, and/or empirical, that is, based on experience or observation. Beyond today’s disciplinary encapsulation in hard versus soft sciences, Victimology requires an interdisciplinary understanding of values, ideas, experiences and facts. Besides, trascending mystification or demonization, being a victim or stopping being a victim is not only a personal or interpersonal issue but mainly a cultural, ethical, social, political and economic dynamic.

Image 1: Defining Victimology

Image 2: Some concepts within the processes of victimisation and de-victimisation

The scientific meaning of the very complex processes of victimisation and de-victimisation, affecting real lives and societies, can only be grasped in the intersections of the micro, meso and macro levels of what we call victimhood, as will be explained later in this book. Interdisciplinarity has to do with intersectionality (Dancig-Rosenberg and Yosef, 2019) and the ecological models (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) for explaining concrete human behaviour, organisations such as the criminal justice system, and society in general. These pages use a critical structuration theory (Walklate, 1990), where agency and structure interact.