A young girl tries to thumb a ride home from a local bar on a hot summers day. She is wearing a very short mini-skirt and a revealing lacy top. A young man in a sports car picks up the hitchhiker and interprets her appreciation as a sign of sexual interest. He drives to a deserted parking lot and begins making sexual advances. She resists but he assumes her protests are just feigned. He pins her down and rapes her, after which she escapes and runs screaming from the car. Did she contribute to the rape by miscommunication. Is victim precipitation a major reason for sexual assault.
An appliance store in a ghetto neighbourhood lures customers with deceptive adverts. It’s salesmen use high-pressure tactics to persuade poor people to buy costly items they cannot afford on “lay buy” plans. If they fall behind in their payment plans their items are repossessed or their wages are garnished by order of civil court judges. If the items are defective the stores policy is “no exchanges and no refunds”. One night the stores windows are smashed and it is looted and the owner killed. Did the shady business practices incite the neighbourhood residents retaliate.
A man pulls into his driveway in a fancy Audi R8, he leaves the engine idling as he rushes inside to grab his gym bag. A teenager walks by and spots the car. He jumps behind the wheel of the car and drives off. He later has an accident and ditches the car. Was the motorist partly responsible for the theft of and damage to his vehicle? Is victim facilitation a major factor in car theft and hijacking.
THE POSSIBILITY OF SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
Criminologists specialising in the field of Victimology have long been examining the role that the victim plays in criminal events. They examine cases in which people who were harmed, played some identifiable part in their own downfall. Victimologists have departed from the traditional offender-orientated explanations of crime and have raised the possibility of “shared responsibility”. In the broadest sense this concept explores the somewhat controversial standpoint that both the victims and the offenders did something “wrong” and contributed to the criminal event. The victim in many criminal events has acted foolishly, carelessly or even provocatively. Instead of minimising the risks they faced, they heightened them.
THE VICTIM’S ROLE IN SPECIFIC CRIMES
Murder: In many crimes, especially criminal homicide which usually involves intense personal interaction, the victim is often a major contributor to the lawless act. Except in cases where the victim is an innocent bystander, or in cases where a pure accident is involved, the victim may in many cases be one of the major participating causes of his own demise.
Rape: The offender should not be viewed as the sole cause and reason for the offense, and the virtuous rape victim is not always the innocent and passive party. The role played by the victim in rape cases, and their contribution to the perpetration of the offense is an interesting dynamic. Consider the case above. Furthermore, if the penal justice is to be fair, it must be attentive to the problem of “degrees of victim responsibility” for their own victimisation.
Theft and Burglary : Careless people set up the temptation-opportunity situation when they carry their money or leave their valuables in a manner which virtually invites left by pocket picking, burglary, or robbery. Carelessness in handling cash is so persistently a part of everyday living that it must be deemed almost a national habit. Because victim behaviour today is conducive to criminality, it is necessary to develop educational programs aimed at changing risky behaviour. By changing the behaviour of the victim, the crime rate can be reduced.
Vehicle theft: Unlike most personal property which is preserved behind fences and walls, cars constantly move from one exposed location to another, and since auto’s contain their own means of locomotion, potential victims are particularly responsible for varying the degree of theft risk, by where they park and by occasions they provide for starting the engine. The role of the victim is especially consequential for this crime, as many cases of auto theft appears to be essentially a matter of opportunity, they are often victim facilitated as in the example above.
REPEAT VICTIM: REPEATED MISTAKES?
The strongest argument proving that some victims share responsibility with offenders for crimes, involve victims who suffer over and over again are probably doing something ”wrong”. By studying their mistakes, victimologists can uncover their problem behaviours and ultimately correct them.
It seems reasonable to hypothesize that there are repeat victims who repeatedly share responsibility. The obvious analogy it is accident prone people just repeatedly to things which cause them to injure themselves, others might repeatedly expose themselves to great risks, which occasionally result in encounters as criminals.
Although it is difficult to gather evidence in support of this hypothesis, as repeat victims are difficult to locate, it would be interesting to study, just why these people were unusually vulnerable, especially attractive to offenders and are particularly exposed to danger. A tentative conclusion about victim-prone people, drawn from a complex statistical analysis of victimization survey data, revealed that repeat victims are more likely to experience the same type of loss or injury twice (for instance to suffer two burglaries or two thefts rather than to experience different types of crime.) If their repeated suffering is considered to be a series of non-random events-that is, they become embroiled in more trouble than might be expected by chance alone-then exactly what are they doing “wrong”.
WHAT ARE VICTIMS DOING “WRONG”?
The possibility of born victims, with an inherited predisposition towards being harmed, has been the subject of some speculation. The desire to suffer might be a basic elements in the personality structure of some repeat victims if they are masochistic or according to psychological interpretation. An alternative to such biological and psychological approaches, with their assumptions about inherent tendencies and/or unconscious desires, is provided by the social/cultural perspective. Victim prone people might have acquired certain attitudes and habits that make them more vulnerable to criminal attack. The images of the country boy (sucker) and the city slicker (con man) exemplify two extremes–one a victim prone person unaware of risks and unprepared to guard his interests until too late, the other schooled in the art of deception and experienced in the way of hustlers.
People learn how to reduce risks from experts: other victims, the police, except offenders, and safety consultants. The field of crime prevention and security management is dedicated to the education of potential targets so that they will no longer be victim-prone. The best advice I can offer is to develop strong situational awareness and take note of what is going on around you!
VICTIM FACILITATION, PRECIPITATION, AND PROVOCATION
A number of concepts have been derived from the broad theme of shared responsibility. The notions of victim facilitation, precipitation and provocation has been defined to describe the specific, identifiable, blameworthy actions taken by certain victims immediately before the commission of crimes.
Victim Facilitation
Facilitation is a term to be reserved for those situations in which victims unknowingly, carelessly, negligently, foolishly, and unwillingly make it easier for the criminal to commit the crime.
Facilitating victims inadvertently assist the offender and therefore share a major amount of blame. They increase the dangers they face and open themselves up to trouble by their own thoughtless action. If it is assumed that the criminal/s who choose them as target was looking for someone to victimise, then victim facilitation is not in any sense a root cause of crime. Facilitation is more like a catalyst in a chemical reaction which, when given the right ingredients and conditions, speeds up the interaction. Facilitating victims attract criminally inclined people to them and thereby influence the distribution of crime.
Vehicle theft and burglary are the crimes cited by criminologists most frequently in discussions of the problem of facilitation. Consider the example of the motorist above! Similarly, a residential burglary is considered victim facilitated if force is not used to enter the premises because a homeowner or apartment dweller left the door unlocked or a window wide open.
Research has revealed some interesting facts regarding victim facilitated burglaries. These crimes are underreported; Younger people were found to be more relaxed about security than older people; Higher income households were entered without force more frequently than lower income dwellings; Tenants were more careless than owners; Central city households were him burgled more often than suburban or rural ones; and, white people appeared to be more negligent about locking doors and windows than black people. No force entries were found to be more common then break-ins. But these easily preventable losses were generally smaller, indicating a greater participation of amateur thieves acting spontaneously, seizing the opportunities provided by victims who made their task easier.
Victim Provocation & Precipitation
Whereas facilitation is usually raised as a possibility in crimes of theft, charges about precipitation and provocation are directed at victims of violent crimes, such as murder and rape. Victim precipitation is the label applied to those cases in which the person who was killed had been the first to use the force – to brandish and use a weapon – to strike a blow during an argument – or to resort to physical violence to settle the dispute. Often, the victim and the offender had a prior relationship perhaps they had quarrelled previously. Situations that commonly incite people to violence include, infidelity by an inmate or lover, failure to pay a debt, drinking bouts and intoxication, drug use, confrontations over insults, and the utterance of “fighting words”.
These victim precipitated cases differ in a number of statistically significant ways from other homicides in which the slain people in no way brought about their own demise ÔÇô according to police reconstructions of the events leading up to the killings. Nearly all the precipitated victims were men, whereas a sizable majority of totally innocent victims were women. Conversely, few woman committed homicide, but of those that did, a substantial number were provoked by the violence of the men they slew. Victim precipitated killings are carried out by offenders wielding knives or other sharp instruments in more than 50% of cases, whereas other homicides were due to stabbings in only a third of the cases. Alcohol was used before most killings, especially victim-precipitated ones. It turns out that in victim-precipitated homicide, more often than in the killings of totally innocent people, the victim was the one who had been doing the drinking, rather than the offender.
Examinations of the victims police records revealed that in cases of precipitation the victim was more likely to have had a prior run-in with the law been in cases of no precipitation. It is estimated that about one murder out of every four may be victim precipitated. This finding ÔÇô that a considerable proportion of slain people were partly responsible for their fate ÔÇô and has resulted in some criminologists viewing certain victims in a rather harsh lightÔÇöas “troublemakers not deserving of much compression or support.
Research has proved that stereotypes surrounding victims and offenders are incorrect. The images of victim’s as weak and passive people shrinking from confrontation, and offenders as strong, brutal and aggressive people hunting their prey, departed from reality. In many victim precipitated homicide’s the characteristics of the victims closely resembled those of the offender. In some cases chance alone determined which one of them would be designated the loser –and therefore the victim in their encounter.
It is possible that some of these pecipitative victims actually want to die. Their rash actions and foolhardy initiatives could be interpreted as attempts to commit suicide, as if they had a death wish but could not quite carry it through without help. We see this today in “suicide by cop” scenarios where victims “force” police officers to fire on them rather than go to prison.
The term sub-intentional death can be applied to all situations in which victims play a contributory role in their own demise, either by exercising poor judgment, by taking excessive risks, or by pursuing a self-destructive lifestyle. This type of speculation based on unverifiable interpretations of possible motives, is clearly unsympathetic to dead victims who allegedly manipulated others to kill them. But this line of thought does raise the intriguing questions about whether some people want to suffer and be punished and consciously or unconsciously enter into risky situations or engineered traffic events that ultimately harm them. In the cases of homicide victims the argument rests on a record of several “near misses” that preceded the final dramatic violent outbursts across the victims their lives.
An equally plausible explanation, which is not psychologically based, is that these precipitative victims didn’t want to die. They thought they would emerge from the battles as winners not losers. They didn’t welcome their fate. What might be interpreted as a death wish, was really their adherence to a sub-culture of violence. This willingness to resort to physical compact and to escalate arguments into deadly confrontations is thought to be most prevalent among young men in urban slums. However the approval of the use of force as a method of solving problems characters world politics as well as street-corner life.
Please take care when entering into risky situations, or potentially placing yourselves in harm’s way. Improve your situational awareness with reference to possible danger and always be prepared to diffuse confrontational situations for your own sake. Once you are a victim it’s too late and you could suffer huge losses either from injury or loss.
I have established a consulting firm – Expert Profiling contactable on Tel: 390 9957 which is ideally placed to assist. For more info visit our website on www.expert-profiling.com or email me on [email protected]
