Book Review: Victims, Crime, & Society: An Introduction
| Author | Paul Kenneth Mwirigi Kinyua |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2032284420916006 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
Book Review
Victims, Crime, & Society: An Introduction, Pamela Davies, Peter Francis and Chris Greer (eds.) (2nd ed.,
London: Sage, 2017), ISBN 9781446255919, 304 pp., £32.99
Reviewed by: Paul Kenneth Mwirigi Kinyua, Advocate of the High Court of Kenya; UNICAF University
DOI: 10.1177/2032284420916006
This book addresses the subject of victimology, which is the study of victims of crime and
victimisation. The primary aim of the contributors to this book is to present a critical per-
spective on the understanding of victims of crimeandtheirneeds.Amajorconcernforthe
contributors is that, traditionally, representations of crime and victims in official crime
records, in studies of crime by scholars and in the media have contributed to the development
of certain assumptions and approaches; in turn, those assumptions and approaches have
influenced the development of particular victimological policies and practices. A key feature
of traditional victimology (‘orthodox/positivist victimology’) is a narrow view of crime,
resulting in a lack of concern with ‘wider structural issues’ such as economic and social
concerns that underlie crime.
In this book, these assumptions of positivist victimology are contrasted with explanations for
victimhood provided by socialist, radical and feminist approaches. The latter approaches comprise
critical victimology, and their common feature is to highlight both the social processes within
which people are defined as victims and the victims’ socio-economic context. While orthodox or
positivist victimology would resort to innate characteristics to explain why certain people become
victims of crime, critical victimology contends that crime is socially constructed. Race, class, age
and gender are seen as important factors in developing an understanding about who the victim is
and how best to understand and respond to their experiences. A foremost concern for critical
victimology, since its emergence in the closing decades of the 20th century, has been to ensure
that victims of crime and survivors of abuse and injustice are brought to the attention of state
officials and policymakers, and also receive academic attention. A foundational claim made in
chapter 1 is that ‘criminal victimisation tends to be disproportionately concentrated among some of
most vulnerable and marginalised sections of society’.
The work of the two leading early victimologists in the orthodox tradition is discussed in the
opening chapters. The first, von Hentig, developed victim typologies which attempted to confirm
the proneness to victimhood of some people such as women, children and the elderly. His counter-
part, Mendelsohn, understood victimhood more legalistically through the concept of reasonable-
ness. Von Hentig and Mendelsohn had one thing in common. Both took the White, heterosexual
male as the standard benchmark of their theoretical schemes.
New Journal of European Criminal Law
2020, Vol. 11(3) 433–435
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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