Theories of Victimization in Criminology Explained

Introduction: The Rise of Victimization Theory

The fields of criminology and criminal justice have historically focused on understanding criminal offending rather than criminal victimization. However, a variety of paradigm shifts, scientific advances, and social and political forces since the 1960s and 1970s provided a foundation from which theories of victimization emerged.

In the latter half of the 20th century, a shift occurred among many scholars toward viewing "crime" as more than just the behavior of an offender. Instead, crime became increasingly viewed as a "system" involving not only an offender but also a target or victim, as well as a time-and-place context that supports or facilitates the victimization of the target by the offender.

Alongside this new paradigm, new sources of information about crime emerged, addressing limitations of data compiled from police reports (reported annually in the form of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program). Specifically, the early 1970s marked the emergence of the National Crime Survey — now called the National Crime Victimization Survey — which allows large amounts of information on crime events, from the vantage point of victims, to be collected and analyzed annually. This national effort set the stage for many subsequent victimization surveys in local communities and on special samples (such as high school students, college students, and women). These various victimization surveys, compared with official police data, allowed researchers to estimate more accurately the incidence and prevalence of crime in society, because they measured crime events whether or not those events were reported to police.

Lifestyle-Exposure Theory

Beginning in the 1960s, a sociopolitical movement sought to provide more attention to victims and their rights within the criminal justice system. In response to this movement, more support services began to be provided to victims, and avenues were opened for enhanced victim involvement in the process of justice — for instance, through victim impact statements.

The confluence of these sociopolitical and scientific shifts was ideal for the emergence of various theoretical perspectives on victimization. These etiological perspectives focused on a wide range of causal influences, from routine daily activities and lifestyles to interpersonal interactional dynamics to broad-based social inequality. The major theories that emphasize these various influences are described in greater detail throughout the remainder of this entry.

In 1978, Michael J. Hindelang, Michael R. Gottfredson, and James Garofalo published their book Victims of Personal Crime: An Empirical Foundation for a Theory of Personal Victimization. This work delineated the sociodemographic correlates of victimization based on an analysis of victimization survey data. They noted that particular subgroups of the U.S. population experienced greater risk of victimization relative to other groups. Specifically, men, younger adults, and African Americans were at increased risk in comparison with women, older Americans, and Whites, for instance.

Routine Activity Theory

To account for such trends in victimization risk, Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garofalo argued that victimization risk was a function of lifestyle. In particular, men, younger adults, and African Americans tended to have lifestyles — including patterns associated with work, school, chores, and leisure — that exposed them to victimization opportunities. The specific features of lifestyles presumed to create greater exposure to crime included time spent in public (especially at night), time away from family or household members, and proximity to or association with high-offending groups. In short, these features of lifestyle shaped the opportunity for individuals to become crime victims.

While Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garofalo were publishing Victims of Personal Crime, Lawrence E. Cohen and Marcus Felson were working on similar research, resulting in the 1979 publication in the American Sociological Review of their seminal article, "Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach." Cohen and Felson examined temporal changes in U.S. crime rates from 1947 to 1974. They focused in particular on predatory crimes, defined as illegal acts involving the direct damaging or taking of the person or property of another (p. 589). They highlighted the dramatic increase in predatory crime during that period, with the most pronounced portion of the overall increase occurring during the 1960s. Cohen and Felson then offered a "routine activity" explanation for this increase.

As a starting point for their theory, Cohen and Felson identified the following three necessary ingredients for crime: (1) a motivated offender, (2) a suitable target, and (3) the absence of capable guardianship. For a predatory crime to occur, a willing, motivated offender must come into contact with a victim or target in a time-and-place context that does not provide an adequate level of protection — that is, where no persons or things could intervene between offender and victim. The convergence in time and space of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardianship was said to present an opportunity for crime.

Cohen and Felson suggested that the first ingredient — a motivated offender — could be treated as a "given." Rather than understanding crime as a function of variation in offender motivation, they indicated that crime could be better understood in terms of variation in the other two ingredients. In particular, they argued that crime had increased so sharply between 1960 and 1970 because of corresponding, profound changes in societal levels of suitable targets and capable guardianship. In short, Cohen and Felson posited that, between 1960 and 1970, Americans and their households became more suitable and less capably guarded targets. They also suggested that it was the changing routine daily activities of U.S. residents that created increased opportunity in the form of increased target suitability and diminished guardianship. Particularly opportunistic activities, according to Cohen and Felson, were nonhousehold activities.

Major shifts in women's labor force participation between 1960 and 1970 were thought to underlie much of the increase in nonhousehold activity levels. Women's markedly increasing participation in the labor force had substantial implications for the public exposure of women and the lack of guardianship provided to American households during the daytime. Cohen and Felson presented data showing that, in 1960, approximately 30% of households were unoccupied by someone 14 years or older between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. By 1971, that figure exceeded 40%. As a result, more and more households lacked capable guardianship, providing increased opportunity for crimes such as burglary. At the same time, women were spending more time outside the home, commuting to and from work, resulting in increased exposure to "street" predatory crime, including robbery.

Beyond work-related activities, Cohen and Felson theorized that routine leisure activities were also changing in the United States between 1960 and 1970, among both men and women. With an increasing percentage of U.S. households consisting of two working adults, more disposable income was available to spend on leisure pursuits outside the home — such as attending sporting events, movies, restaurants, or vacation destinations — and on the purchase of household durable goods such as televisions, stereos, cars, and bicycles. This proliferation of public leisure activities and household items (especially valuable but lightweight items) also increased opportunities for crime. From the routine activity perspective, these leisure and consumption patterns simply made it more likely that motivated offenders would encounter suitable targets in time-and-place contexts lacking adequate guardianship.

Cohen and Felson tested their theory by examining whether a "household activity ratio" was related to changing rates of predatory crime in the United States. They measured the household activity ratio as the proportion of U.S. households that were either "non-husband-wife" households or households classified as "married, husband-present, with a female labor-force participant" (1979, p. 600). They hypothesized that increases in such households would be associated with increases in U.S. predatory crime rates, under the assumption that such household structures approximated routine activities that would increase exposure to motivated offenders, increase target suitability, and decrease guardianship. They found impressive support for this hypothesis across five different predatory crimes.

Offending Lifestyle, Self-Control, and Individual Victimization

Following Cohen and Felson's landmark study, later work extended routine activity theory's application beyond changing national rates of crime to variation in individual risk of victimization. Leading theorists — including Cohen, Kluegel, and Land — suggested that the likelihood an individual would experience victimization was a function of that person's exposure to motivated offenders, proximity to high-crime areas, target attractiveness and suitability, and absence of capable guardianship. From this perspective, individuals whose lifestyle and routine activities make them more visible and accessible to potential motivated offenders are at increased risk of victimization. Similarly, individuals whose activities place them in close physical proximity to "risky" areas — those where a large proportion of offenders reside or where many targets exist — face elevated risk. Individuals who possess valuable, visible, accessible, and moveable goods are at greater risk for property victimization. In terms of violent offenses, where victim-offender confrontation is part of the criminal event, individuals with characteristics that make them physically or socially vulnerable — such as small physical size, limited strength, low socioeconomic status, or intoxication — are considered to have heightened victimization risk. Finally, individuals who engage in safety precautions — such as installing extra locks, using security systems or cameras, or participating in neighborhood watch programs — are presumed to face reduced overall victimization risk.

Empirical evidence regarding routine activity theory's ability to explain individual variation in victimization has been impressive. Several decades of research have shown that individual-level indicators of exposure, proximity, target suitability, and guardianship are positively related, as predicted, to a variety of victimization types — including property crime and violent street crimes (such as burglary, theft, physical assault, robbery, and sexual violence), school crime, crime on college campuses, workplace violence, computer fraud, and white-collar crime.

As an offshoot of routine activity theory's application to individual victimization risk, researchers have given special attention to the role of criminal offending behavior in shaping that risk. A long-standing recognition in the field holds that a substantial overlap exists between victim and offender populations — in other words, many offenders are also crime victims. Despite recognition of this correlation, research has not clearly established whether the relationship is causal, and competing theoretical ideas exist about how offending and victimization might be linked.

The most popular perspective on the offending-victimization linkage is consistent with routine activity theory: a criminal lifestyle provides opportunity for victimization. A criminal offender is likely exposed to other offenders and often in close proximity to high-crime locations because of his or her own offending activities. Furthermore, a criminal offender often presents target suitability. A successful drug dealer, for instance, possesses a plentiful stock of a valuable commodity as well as a considerable amount of cash — both of which make attractive targets. Other types of offenders are suitable targets because of their vulnerability; a drug user, for example, is more easily exploited when under the influence of his or her addiction. Additionally, offenders may be viewed as suitable targets because their offending behavior is provocative, eliciting strong retaliatory reactions. Finally, an offender can be thought to have less capable guardianship than a nonoffender, insofar as an offender is less likely to call on law enforcement for protection out of fear that his or her own criminal activities will be exposed.

Despite theoretical and empirical support for the idea that offending increases victimization risk, the causal linkage is far from proven. The reverse relationship — victimization increasing offending — is also supported both theoretically and empirically. This reverse relationship is justified on the grounds that victimization is a traumatic event that can cause negative reactions, including escape behavior and offending in some who experience it. Another explanation is that victimization causes withdrawal from prosocial ties and activities, thereby increasing exposure to and involvement with marginalized others, including offenders. Although there is limited empirical support for this idea, somewhat contradictory evidence suggests that victimization may lead to a less risky, rather than a more risky, lifestyle.

Much debate thus surrounds whether offending causes victimization or, conversely, whether victimization affects offending — and, if the latter, whether victimization increases or decreases offending. Given this theoretical ambiguity, some researchers have proposed that offending and victimization are reciprocally rather than unidirectionally related. One seminal piece of research in this regard is the work of Janet Lauritsen, Robert Sampson, and John Laub. In their 1991 article published in Criminology, they analyzed the first five waves of the National Youth Survey and found that a delinquent lifestyle significantly increased victimization, but that victimization also significantly increased delinquent lifestyle. This study remains fundamentally important as one of the few to address reciprocity between offending and victimization.

Another offshoot of routine activity theory's application to individual victimization risk is the theoretical emphasis on self-control among crime victims. Christopher Schreck, in particular, has been at the forefront of developing a theoretical understanding of how an individual's self-control contributes to victimization risk. His explanation dovetails closely with routine activity theory, relying on the idea that variations in self-control coincide with variations in criminal opportunity. Individuals with low self-control are risk takers, for instance, leading to greater exposure to dangerous people and places. Additionally, individuals with low self-control are more likely to be deemed suitable targets by peers because of their impulsive — sometimes noxious — behavior, which can antagonize motivated offenders. Finally, lower self-control implies limited planning and foresight, suggesting that capable guardianship may be more often lacking among individuals with such a trait.