This combination has brought about greater political support for crime victims' rights legislation and increased funding for crime victim services (Victimology Theory, 2003) There are many important questions that need to be looked at when studying victims of crime. Some of these questions include:

Why was a particular person targeted for a crime?

How were they targeted, or were they a victim of opportunity?

What are the chances of that person becoming a victim at random?

What risk did the offender take in order to commit the crime against that victim?

How was the victim advanced upon? Were they restrained and/or attacked?

What was the victim's reaction to the attack?

The answers to these questions help to provide some ideas about the offender's motive and possibly other information about them. From this point, other assessment can be made about the offender's likely background including his knowledge of forensic and police procedures, his possible occupation, his physical characteristics and social skills. When possible, conclusion made by the profiler about the offender should be checked off against other inputs such as eyewitness accounts and the information available from the crime scene (Petherick, 2008).

The inferences discussed about are somewhat basic, and are just an example of the ways that victimology can provide information in regards to...

Simply by looking into victimology, it can determines whether the victims were chosen at random, possibly by whom, and we may even be able to determine some of the offender's characteristics through a good victimology (Petherick, 2008).
By understanding how and why victims were chosen, was there a relationship between the offender and victims, along with other kinds of links provide investigators with many possible theories regarding the crime. The number of possible links is endless, so a good victimology is essential to narrow this down and to be able to better understand and predict criminal conduct (Petherick, 2008).

It is often very difficult to understand or get any insight into why people commit crimes, but the area of victimology has come a long way in helping to figure these things out. It is very useful to figure out what connections the victims and the perpetrators had in order to try and figure out why the crime was committed, and then use this information to hopefully prevent future crimes.

References

Petherick, Wayne. (2008). Victimology: The Study of Victims in Criminal Investigations.

Retrieved June 23, 2009, from TruTV Web site:

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/criminal_mind/profiling/victimology/1.html

Victimology Theory. Retrieved June 23, 2009, from Web site:

http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/300/300lecturenote01.htm