Читать книгу Approaching Victimology as social science for Human rights a Spanish perspective - Gema Varona Martínez - Страница 7

When Edwin Sutherland included in his 1924 work Criminology a chapter entitled “The Victims of Crime”, he was mainly referring to the impact of crime and was not concerned about creating an autonomous discipline. However, in its origin, the definition of Victimology was a very restricted one. Victimology is a young social science that was born under the shadow of positivist criminology in the 1930s in Europe. At that time, criminology, created at the end of the 19th century in Europe and influenced by Compte’s positivism, was obsessed with finding the “causes of crime” by assuming that the “criminal other” was different to the “normal us”. The first victimologists thought about the victim as one factor favouring crime and talked about different victim typologies –parallel with the criminal typologies–. According to the so-called fathers of Victimology, von Hentig (1940/1-1948) and Mendelsohn (1940–1956), we could talk of the born, the guilty, the provoking or the consensual victim, among others (Fattah, 2000; Dussich, 2006; O’Connell, 2008; Wemmers, 2010).

Perhaps, it is easier to understand this labelling and blaming standpoint, if we consider the kind of crimes and interests in the observation carried out by the above-mentioned authors that made them study processes of crime precipitation, facilitation or provocation by victims. Nuances on the guilt or blame of victims were elaborated in victim typologies and, for example, Mendelsohn referred to the completely innocent victim; the victim with minor guilt; the voluntary victim; the guiltier than the offender victim; the mostly guilty victim; and the imaginary victim.

Von Hentig, a German jurist and psychologist who concentrated on common frauds talked about the scammer being scammed. Mendelsohn, a Romanian lawyer defending men who killed their wives, wrote about the science of the victim. In synthesis, two influences can be found in this first positivist Victimology: one is the positivist criminological search for the causes of crime in an empirical way (developing observation on real cases or experimental studies); the other is the influence of psychoanalysis and “psychological literature” of the time (with Franz Werfel, among others) arguing that even the murdered person might eventually be the guilty one (Fattah, 2000).

In contrast to the above-mentioned typologies, on the origin of Victimology, it is very interesting to note that the English term “Victimology” dates back to the book The show of violence (1949) by the polemical German-American psychiatrist F. Wertham. In the so-called American crime comics of that period, Wertham criticised the fact that the victimiser is presented to the youth as a hero whereas the victim is a passive object of his violent acts. Wertham suggested that this cultural representation was linked to increasing juvenile delinquency. This thesis was later developed in his contested book Seduction of the innocent (1954). Thus, that view of Victimology was a moralising one.

Somehow, in the origin of Victimology, we can see this persistent utilitarian temptation of balancing the notion of the victim between banalising (demonising) and moralising (mystification). In the birth of the discipline of Victimology, we can find the use (and abuse) of the notion of the victim as an instrument to consider either the causes of violence or the defence of concrete moral ideologies, beyond the tangible injustice of the harm suffered. That potential manipulation should have little to do with scientific research, defined as an attempt to know by being objective (observing reality aware of the persistent potential bias); being dialectical (offering limited evidence and under constant verification), and being intelligible (with a systematic simplification and representation of the observation of a complex reality). However, Victimology moves in a difficult arena: with those premises, how to conceptualise victims, victimhood, victimisation, victimism, reparation, recovery and justice? And how to develop practical victimological interventions, evaluations and research?

The first Victimology did not look at the whole picture of victimisation1. Positivist Victimology was later developed in the fifties in the United States by Ellenberger, who studied the victim risk, as well as Wolfgang, who focussed on victim precipitation in homicide and stated that the victim was the first to use violence or a weapon in 26% of the 588 homicides studied in Philadelphia and committed during the period 1948-1952. Following Wolfgang, Menachem Amir studied rape in that city under a victim-blaming assumption, for example, in relation to the consumption of alcohol. Positivist Victimology has remained always current in criminal law and witnessed a renewed interest in it in the 1980s with the so-called victim-dogmatic hypothesis (studying the self-responsibility of the victims and the role of consent, provocation, legitimate defence and necessity in certain crimes).

Modern Victimology was born in the 1960s, influenced by women rights and civil rights movements promoting victim support groups, legislation and policies, first in the United States and other Anglo-Saxon countries and later in Europe and elsewhere. Stephan Schafer (1968) can be thought of as a victimologist in the transition from positivist to modern Victimology, softening the formal or legalistic and individualistic vision of criminal law. In 1968, he published the first handbook on Victimology.

Within modern Victimology, Walklate distinguishes between:

i) Realist or constructivist Victimology (concerned with aggregated data and victimisation rates in victim surveys2, prevalence, incidence and concentration). This kind of Victimology usually follows a victim’s routine lifestyle and a victimiser’s rational choice model to explain victimisation (Hindelang, Gottfredson y Garofalo, 1978; Cohen and Felson, 1979).

ii) Critical Victimology where radical Victimology on collective suffering and abuse of (state) power can be mentioned.

Image 3: Evolution in Victimology

Beyond the expansion of activist movements for general or specific crime victims worldwide, there has been growing international and comparative legislation on compensation, support and rights, as well as international symposiums, academic courses and training, scientific associations and specialised publications (like the International Review of Victimology, first published in 1989, and the Revista de Victimología/Journal of Victimology, first published in 2015).

There have also been International Symposiums of Victimology organized by the World Society of Victimology3 started in 1973, in Jerusalem, Israel, organised by Prof. I. Drapkin. Later, we can mention the following:

• 1976 Boston (USA)

• 1979 Münster (Germany)

• 1982 Tokyo/Kyoto (Japan)

• 1985 Zagreb (then Yugoslavia, today Croatia)

• 1988 Jerusalem (Israel)

• 1991 Río de Janeiro (Brasil)

• 1994 Adelaide (Australia)

• 1997 Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

• 2000 Montreal (Canada)

• 2003 Stellenbosch (South Africa)

• 2006 Orlando (USA)

• 2009 Mito (Japan)

• 2012 The Hague (The Netherlands)

• 2015 Perth (Australia)

• 2018 Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China)

• 2022 Donostia-San Sebastián (Spain)

In recent decades new trends in Victimology can be mentioned such as feminist (Clay-Warner and Edgemon, 2020), developmental (Finkelhor, 2007), positive (Ronel and Toren, 2012), green (White, 2015), cultural (Pemberton, 2018), visual (Walklate, 2019) and narrative (Presser and Sandberg, 2019) victimologies. In relation to today’s development of a narrative Victimology, we might argue that we need a conversational Victimology that could develop more ecological critical frameworks. If narrative criminology has critical potential “if concerned (i) about harm beyond crime; (ii) collective involvement in patterns of harm; (iii) dynamism of harm and possibilities of resistance; and (iv) researcher’s reflexivity” (Presser and Sandberg, 2019), a conversational Victimology might aim at integrating restorative and transformative forms of justice by questioning assumed social identities, rights and responsibilities of victims, offenders and bystanders (Varona, 2020b; Pemberton, 2015; Green, Calverley and O’Leary, 2021).