Читать книгу Approaching Victimology as social science for Human rights a Spanish perspective онлайн

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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.

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).