Curiosity and concern about victims has been around to some extent since the beginning of criminological studies. Upon the adoption of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, crimes were redefined as being hostile acts directed against the authority of the state, the state being defined as the representative of the people. The commission of a crime was considered a threat to the social order. Prosecutors representing the public interest and acting on behalf of the government and society assumed the powers and responsibilities that previously had been exercised by victims (Karmen, 2007).

It was not until the late 1950s that a focus on victims began to develop on a more professional level. This focus intensified following the uptick in street crimes in the 1960s (Feucht & Zedlewski, 2019). The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration was created, and its task force issued its findings in a 1967 report entitled The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. This marked a definitive beginning in the history of the discipline of victimology.

In Chapter 2, the reader was introduced to three primary sources of criminological data utilized by practitioners in the discipline. The three sources are (a) the Uniform Crime Report; (b) the National Crime Victimization Survey; and (c) the various offender-based self-report surveys. These sources afford the victimologist important information to better grasp the reality of crime levels and resultant victimization. The tools include raw numbers of crimes, rates of occurrence, patterns where discernable, trends, and profiles. However, the self-report surveys that provide information from offenders are considered somewhat less reliable due to the potential for bias, concealment, and exaggeration (Joliffe & Farrington, 2014).

Despite being afforded the luxury of these statistical reports and surveys, the picture of victimization is not yet entirely clear. This is due in part to the acknowledged existence of the “dark figure of crime,” crime that for whatever reason is not reported (VanderPyl, 2024, 2.3 section). Further, even if criminal behavior or events are documented and reported, not all crimes fall within the eight crimes indexed in the Uniform Crime Report. In addition, biases potentially exist in the documentation and reporting of crime (Langton et al., 2012). These biases include:

• Anecdotal stories or extrapolated facts regarding a violator or the victim
• The limited personal experience of the officer, investigator, or reporter
• False impressions of the victim that may be formed when the crime is investigated
• Unintended or misleading media depictions of the crime scene or the victim
• The vested interests of “stakeholders”: local government, schools, businesses
• Myths about crime and its outcomes that are popular and widely held but are inaccurate

By examining examples of victimology occurring today, the reader will see an array of the traditional forms of crimes being perpetrated against others. An emerging area of victimization concerns crimes against the transgender population. In 2019, the American Medical Association noted an “epidemic of violence against the transgender community” (Madara, 2019, para. 1), who are “over 2.5 times more likely than cisgender people—those whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were designated at birth—to experience violence” (as cited in Mandler, 2022). While regional variations of impact are evident, an Everytown report also cites “dangerous gun bills” and legislation passed at the state level invoking a record number of anti-transgender bills. The result is “an environment ripe for deadly gun violence fueled by hate” (2020/2024, para. 11). Another sad outcome relates to suicide rates where 40% of trans youth reported attempting suicide in their lifetime (James et al., 2016). With six out of every 10 suicides in the US involving a firearm, the “epidemic of firearm suicide could have a disproportionate impact on transgender and adolescent members of the LGBTQ+ community” (Everytown, 2020/2024, para. 13). In a survey designed to study gender identity disparities in criminal victimization in 2017–2018, it was found that transgender people experienced 86.2 victimizations per 1,000 persons compared with 21.7 victimizations per 1,000 for persons in the cisgender category (Flores et al., 2021). Coincidentally, households having a transgender person had nearly twice as many incidents of property-related victimization than their cisgender homeowner counterparts. In Washington State in particular, transgender people are victimized at an alarming rate compared to the general population (National Center for Transgender Equality, 2017).

REPETITIVE VICTIMIZATION

Some crimes are “one-offs,” such as crimes of opportunity or happenstance. In other cases, a person or a place may be revisited, leading to repetitive victimization. Some examples include:

• Recurring victimization: a person or a place, such as a business, school, or park, is victimized more than once by any variety of victimization.
• Repeat victimization: a person or a place is victimized more than once by the same type of crime or victimization.
• Revictimization: a person is victimized more than once by any variety of victimization. This victimization occurs across a wide span of time: months, years, or even from childhood into adulthood. The revictimizing may come about as a fleeting thought, a smell, certain music or sounds, or some other triggering event.
• Polyvictimization: a term generally used for childhood recurring victimization in which a person has experienced multiple forms of victimization, such as a child enduring beatings from a parent and then being sexually abused by a neighbor.
• Near-repeat victimization: a place is victimized in the near vicinity of a place that was previously victimized. An example of this is “porch-pirate” thefts, where delivered packages are stolen off porches or driveways on the same street in a neighborhood.

One of the worst mass shootings in the United States occurred at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas in October 2017. A sniper on the hotel’s 32nd floor in possession of a modified rifle fired over 1,000 rounds in 10 minutes directed at concertgoers at an outdoor venue. In all, 59 people were killed and at least 527 were injured, making it one of the most horrific mass shooting events in history (Hutchinson et al., 2018).

What makes this event and its aftermath somewhat unique is the litigation that followed. Victims and survivors filed individual and class action lawsuits against Mandalay Bay alleging inadequate security and a failure to protect its customers (Hassan & Li, 2019). Less than one year later, the hotel’s owner, MGM Grand International, filed a countersuit naming over 1,000 victims in the shooting as defendants (Haskell, 2018). While not seeking money damages, the hotel owner filed the countersuit to obtain a change in venue for the litigation from federal court to state court and to be shielded from liability. What is lost in all of this is the recurring victimization that occurred: the physical and mental trauma incurred at the shooting event, the questioning immediately following, and the subsequent courtroom testimony as a result of the countersuit.

Attributions

1. Figure 4.1: Image released under the Pexels License
2. Figure 4.2: Las Vegas Strip shooting site 2017 (overlay) by Poeticbent is released under CC BY-SA 4.0