"The possibility of being a victim of a crime is ever present on my mind; thinking about it as natural as breathing."—40-year-old woman
This is a compelling analysis of how women in the United States ...perceive the threat of crime in their everyday lives and how that perception controls their behavior. Esther Madriz draws on focus groups and in-depth interviews to show the damage that fear can wreak on women of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although anxiety about crime affects virtually every woman, Madriz shows that race and class position play a role in a woman's sense of vulnerability.
Fear of crime has resulted in public demand for stronger and more repressive policies throughout the country. As funds for social programs are cut, Madriz points out, those for more prisons and police are on the increase. She also illustrates how media images of victims—"good" victims aren't culpable, "bad" victims invite trouble—and a tough political stance toward criminals are linked to a general climate of economic uncertainty and conservatism.
Madriz argues that fear itself is a strong element in keeping women in subservient and self-limiting social positions. "Policing" themselves, they construct a restricted world that leads to positions of even greater subordination: Being a woman means being vulnerable. Considering the enormous attention given to crime today, including victims' rights and use of public funds, Madriz's informative study is especially timely.
An overview discusses feminist analyses of oppression, attitudes toward rape victims, and previously studied predictors of individuals’ attitudes toward rape victims. To better understand such ...attitudes, this meta-analysis examines the moderating influences of various rape victim, perpetrator, and crime characteristics’ rape myth consistency on gender differences in individuals’ perceptions of rape victims (i.e., victim responsibility and blame attributions and rape minimizing attitudes). Consistent with feminist theoretical predictions, results indicated that, overall, men perceived rape victims more negatively than women did. However, this sex difference was moderated by the rape myth consistency within the rape vignettes. Implications for research are discussed.
Despite a growing body of research on the victim-offender overlap, limited scholarship has examined this phenomenon in the context of the prison. This paper advances theory and scholarship on the ...victim-offender overlap and prison social order by examining linkages between prison misconduct and victimization. Examination of the overlap in the prison context extends the generality of the model and provides greater insight into the implications of the prison experience on behavior. This paper uses nationally representative data from the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities and bi-probit analyses to estimate whether the overlap exists within the prison setting and whether victimization and misconduct can be explained using the same theoretical framework. Findings suggest that common and unique risk factors exist for victimization and misconduct. Results have implications for theory, research, and policy related to understanding the relationship between victims and offenders and deviance in the prison setting.
Using data from a cross-national survey conducted on representative samples of populations from 10 European countries (n = 10,766), the present study is the first one to empirically measure the ...validity of Christie’s influential ideal victim model. We use a range of scenarios built around common types of anti-LGBT violence to verify the extent to which the public’s empathy for victims is contingent on the victim’s identity and the circumstances of the crime. The results provide strong evidence that, when applied to this group of victims, the rules of the ideal victim work, adequately moderating the public’s emotional reactions. We found that all victims receive relatively high levels of empathy, but the further the victim is from the ideal, the less support they can count on. Thus, even though no victim is “rejected,” a clear hierarchy of victimization emerges. As a group, LGBT people suffer from an empathy deficit, but there also are considerable variations within this group, with a lesbian attacked by extremists receiving the most, and a drunk transgender person receiving the least empathy from the public. The study contributes to the development of theory by embedding the ideal victim model in a broader sociological paradigm of dramaturgical analysis. Since our research shows that the victim’s LGBT status decreases the levels of empathy (being seen as a type of stigma), we call for more attention to be paid to the actor’s identity in Goffman’s framework. Implications for practice and further research are offered.
The need for more people to register as organ donors is a pressing concern. This preregistered experiment examined whether portraying a patient in need of an organ transplant as leading a healthy ...lifestyle (an "innocent victim") can serve to increase people's intentions to register as post-mortem organ donors. Participants not previously registered as organ donors (N = 348) were randomly assigned to an innocent identified victim, non-innocent identified victim, or statistical victims condition. The identified victim was a 42 year-old woman in need of a liver transplant. The experimental manipulation produced marginally significant effects on self-reported intentions to register as an organ donor. Moreover, participants in the innocent victim condition were more likely relative to those in the non-innocent victim condition to sign up on an e-mail list to receive additional information about organ donation.
Abstract
The use of technology, including smartphones, cameras, Internet-connected devices, computers and platforms such as Facebook, is now an essential part of everyday life. Such technology is ...used to maintain social networks and carry out daily tasks. However, this technology can also be employed to facilitate domestic and family violence. Drawing on interviews undertaken with 55 domestic and family violence survivors in Brisbane, Australia, this article outlines survivors’ experiences of technology-facilitated domestic and family violence. The frequency and nature of abusive behaviours described by the women suggest this is a key form of abuse deserving more significant attention.
Objectives:
Compared to homicide-only, homicide-suicide is understudied in the criminological literature. This study investigates the victim-offender relationship—one of the most well-established ...correlates of homicide-suicide—from a new angle. In addition to examining the familiarity/closeness of the victim-offender relationship, this study investigates whether the racial composition (interracial versus intraracial) of the victim-offender dyad impacts the likelihood of committing suicide following homicide.
Method:
This study uses data on 26,858 homicide and homicide-suicide cases distributed across 3,178 places and 45 U.S. states from the National Violent Death Reporting System appended to information from the American Community Survey. Hierarchical logistic regression models examine the independent and joint contribution of: (1) the familiarity/closeness of the victim-offender relationship; and (2) the racial composition of the victim-offender dyad on homicide-suicide.
Results:
Killing familiar and same-race victims independently increase the odds of suicide following homicide; additionally, the odds of suicide following homicide are highest for offenders with both familiar and same-race victims.
Conclusions:
The findings suggest that homicide-suicide research should account for different aspects of the victim-offender relationship. Additionally, the importance of race/ethnicity extends to even the rarest of crimes.
Research is equivocal about how the social relationship between victims and offenders is linked to the emotional, social, and physical consequences of violence. This study examines the association of ...victim–offender relationship with the adverse outcomes reported by injured and uninjured victims of violence.
The study analyzed 16,723 violent victimizations recorded by the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2008 to 2018. Multivariable quasi-Poisson models estimated the associations between the victim–offender relationship and victims’ emotional distress, social distress, and physical and emotional symptoms. These models also estimated a statistical interaction between victim–offender relationship and violent injury to examine how this association differed for injured and uninjured victims. The analyses occurred during 2020 and 2021.
Uninjured victims were more likely to report emotional distress (risk ratio=1.41, 95% CI=1.33, 1.50), social distress (risk ratio=3.12, 95% CI=2.78, 3.51), more physical symptoms (symptom frequency ratio=1.68, 95% CI=1.51, 1.87), and more emotional symptoms (symptom frequency ratio=1.13, 95% CI=1.08, 1.18) in family member/intimate partner violence than in stranger violence. Victims also reported worse outcomes after acquaintance violence than after stranger violence. For injured victims, these differences narrowed—but were still significant—in emotional and social distress models. However, the number of emotional and physical symptoms reported by injured victims did not significantly vary across victim–offender relationships.
Relational closeness between victims and offenders is a risk factor for adverse outcomes after violent victimization, and it is more strongly associated with these outcomes for uninjured victims than for injured victims.
Research has drawn attention to the stigma and high rates of victimization among people with intellectual disabilities (ID) and an overlap between bias and non-bias victimization. However, studies of ...bias events or hate crime involving persons with ID are scarce. Using a self-report measure, we analyze lifetime bias victimization in a sample of 260 adults diagnosed with ID (age M = 41.7, SD = 12.0; 59.2% men), of whom 92 experienced bias victimization (age M = 41.2, SD = 11.9; 54.3% men), and compare the number of different types of victimization and the poly-victimization status between bias and non-bias victims. We also examine the following features: the victim, offender(s), victim–offender relationship, and location. Results show that bias victims experience a higher number of different types of victimization than non-bias victims (M = 7.74 and 4.96, respectively; p <.001, rrb=.37, ξ=.42) and are four times more likely to be poly-victims than non-bias victims (odds ratio OR = 4.37; 95% CI, p <.001). Most of the victims experienced a number of bias victimization episodes (89.1%; n = 82), and more than a quarter were injured (27.2%, n = 25) as a result of the victimization. All the bias victimizations by strangers were carried out in public places, as were most of the bias victimizations by acquaintances. Schoolmates and work colleagues perpetrated attacks at school and in the workplace, respectively. More than half of the victims, 63% (n = 58), spoke of the experience with someone, but only one reported it to the authorities. The paper provides a valuable descriptive and bivariate analysis of bias victimization of people with ID. The findings will help to understand bias violence against this population, highlighting the need for targeted and effective interventions.
Collective memories of historical ingroup victimization can be linked to prosocial or hostile intergroup outcomes. We hypothesize that such discrepant responses are predicted by different construals ...of the ingroup's victimization in relation to other groups (i.e., comparative victim beliefs). Using improved measures of inclusive and exclusive victim beliefs, with a global or regional reference group, multigroup structural equation modeling showed across four different groups (Armenian Americans N = 265, Jewish Americans N = 297, Hungarians N = 301, Poles N = 468) that inclusive victim beliefs predict prosocial, conciliatory attitudes, while exclusive victim beliefs predict hostile attitudes towards historical perpetrator groups and (in the Polish and Hungarian samples) religious and ethnic outgroups targeted in the present. Moreover, comparative victim beliefs mediated effects of more general psychological orientations (ingroup superiority, universal orientation, perspective‐taking) on intergroup outcomes. These findings suggest the importance of considering distinct collective victim beliefs, and different contexts in research on collective victimhood.
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