The Expanding Scope of Victimology: From Crime Victims to Human Rights

Victimology did not begin as a wide-ranging discipline. For most of its early history, it was preoccupied with a single, rather narrow question: what role did the victim play in the crime? That framing – which sometimes veered into blaming the victim – has since given way to something far more ambitious. Today, victimology examines not just criminal victimization but also abuse by state agencies, systemic social injustice, and human rights violations. Understanding how this scope expanded – and why – is central to studying victimology in the context of criminal justice.

Where victimology started: the criminological focus 🔗

Victimology first emerged in the 1940s and 1950s through the work of scholars like Hans von Hentig and Benjamin Mendelsohn. Both were primarily concerned with the victim-offender relationship – specifically, whether victims bore any responsibility for their own victimization. Mendelsohn famously classified victims into typologies based on their degree of “guilt,” while von Hentig examined how victim characteristics could attract criminal attention.

This early phase had an undeniably limited scope. The discipline was essentially a sub-branch of criminology, and initial victimological work was devoted mainly to studying the behaviors and vulnerabilities of victims – particularly murder victims. The criminal justice system itself remained offender-centric; the victim’s only formal role was as a witness for the prosecution.

In India, this pattern was even more pronounced. Under the Indian criminal justice system, victims of crime have no inherent prerogative, and the state treats victims as mere witnesses. The adversarial structure of India’s legal system meant that justice was conducted between the state and the accused – the actual victim was a peripheral figure.

The shift: from victim-blaming to victim-rights 🔗

By the 1970s, the intellectual tide had shifted. The victims’ rights movement – particularly in the United States – began drawing attention to how badly the justice system was treating people who had suffered harm. Mendelsohn’s earlier work had laid foundations for the victims’ rights movement and led to the creation of victim services agencies, even though his original typologies were far more interested in victim culpability than victim welfare.

Scholars now pushed victimology to examine the victim’s experience with police, courts, and corrections – not just with their offender. Victimologists documented how the interests and needs of injured parties had been routinely overlooked, but were now being addressed as the victims’ rights movement won concessions that empowered victims within the justice system. The focus shifted from asking “did the victim contribute to the crime?” to asking “how does the system fail the victim?”

This was a meaningful expansion of scope, but it was still largely confined to victims of conventional crime. The truly transformative broadening came next.

The three perspectives shaping modern victimology 🔗

Contemporary victimology is not a monolithic field. It operates through at least three distinct ideological orientations, each of which defines the scope of victimization differently.

The conservative perspective 🔗

This view stays closest to the original criminological roots. It focuses on the relationship between victim and offender, examines how individual choices or circumstances create vulnerability, and tends to favor punitive responses to crime. The conservative perspective emphasizes that victims must take precautions against victimization and that the proper response to crime is deterrence through punishment. While this perspective has historically dominated criminal law, critics argue it risks sliding back toward victim-blaming – placing the burden of safety on the individual rather than on social or state structures.

The liberal perspective 🔗

The liberal approach expanded victimology’s concern to include the victim’s experience within the justice system itself. It advocates for victim rights, access to legal assistance, compensation mechanisms, and restorative justice. In India, this perspective gained institutional traction when the Law Commission’s 154th Report (1996) proposed a victim-oriented framework within the Code of Criminal Procedure, followed by the Malimath Committee Report (2003) which recommended expansion of victim rights, prevention of secondary victimization, and state compensation obligations. The liberal view sees the criminal justice system as reformable and works within it to carve out a more meaningful space for victims.

Secondary victimization – the additional harm suffered by victims due to how institutions, law enforcement, and courts treat them – became a key concern under this perspective. The state-centric or offender-centric approach largely overlooked the profound physical, psychological, social, and financial trauma endured by victims, and the liberal perspective directly challenged this neglect.

The radical-critical perspective 🔗

The radical-critical approach is where victimology’s scope most dramatically departs from its criminological origins. Rather than limiting inquiry to the victim-offender dyad or even the victim-justice system relationship, this perspective asks: who creates the conditions in which victimization occurs? It implicates the state, social institutions, and structural inequalities as agents of victimization – not just individual offenders.

In 1985, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, which was itself a product of radical-critical thinking entering mainstream international law. The declaration recognized victims not just of crime but also of abuse of power – including by state actors. Under this declaration, “victims” means persons who have suffered harm through acts or omissions that violate criminal laws, including those proscribing criminal abuse of power.

In the Indian context, this perspective has direct relevance. The landmark Hussainara Khatoon case acknowledged victimization as the result of power abuse by officers and held that such fundamental rights infringements directly violate the right to life and dignity protected by Article 21. This judicial recognition of state-perpetuated victimization was a crucial moment – it brought the radical-critical insight into constitutional jurisprudence.

Expanding the definition of “victim” 🔗

One of the most consequential debates in victimology concerns who counts as a victim. The narrow definition – someone directly harmed by a specific criminal act – is increasingly seen as inadequate. The question of whether victimization from behaviors other than crime should be included, or how to handle crimes without a well-defined individual victim, or when the victim is a corporate entity, remains actively contested among victimologists.

The broader definition, championed by the radical-critical perspective, includes victims of state violence, institutional neglect, environmental harm, white-collar crime, and structural injustice. Victims of white-collar crime, for instance, are often denied their status as victims by the social construction of the concept – they may not be identifiable individuals harmed directly by a single perpetrator, yet the harm they suffer is real and often severe.

In India, academic interest in victims began to focus on specific categories of victimization: caste-based atrocities, gender-based violence, human rights violations by state and non-state actors, and crimes against children – all categories that require moving beyond the narrow offender-focused framework of traditional criminology.

Victimology as a challenge to traditional criminological theory 🔗

The radical expansion of victimology’s scope is not merely additive – it is a direct challenge to how criminology has traditionally framed its questions. Classical criminological theories ask why people commit crimes, how offenders should be classified, and how punishment deters future offending. Victimology – especially in its radical form – argues that this framing is fundamentally incomplete.

Professor Ezzat A. Fattah of Simon Fraser University has argued that the study of victims and victimization has the potential to offer the long-awaited paradigm shift that criminology desperately needs. The claim is that you cannot understand crime by studying only the offender. The victim’s experience, the social conditions that produce vulnerability, and the role of powerful institutions in perpetuating harm are all essential to a complete analysis.

This is not an abstract academic point. In practical terms, it means that a victimological framework would ask different questions about, say, custodial deaths in India, forced displacement of communities, or the treatment of sexual assault survivors by police – questions that conventional criminology, focused on the perpetrator and the penal process, would not naturally raise.

The Indian framework: progress and persistent gaps 🔗

Though no separate law for victims of crime has yet been enacted in India, victim justice has been rendered through affirmative action and orders of the Supreme Court, and many national-level commissions have strongly advocated victims’ rights. Key legislative milestones include Section 357 and Section 357A of the CrPC (now mirrored in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023), which create frameworks for victim compensation at the court and state levels respectively.

The Indian Society of Victimology, established in 1992, has played a significant role in pushing for a dedicated victim assistance law. A pivotal moment came in 1985 with the adoption of the United Nations Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, which provided a universally accepted framework for victim rights and urged member states to incorporate these principles into their national legislation. India’s reforms, slow as they have been, trace their ideological lineage to this document.

Yet structural barriers remain. Marginalized communities – Dalits, Adivasis, women, persons with disabilities – face compounded vulnerability within a system that still struggles to treat victims as stakeholders rather than witnesses. The radical-critical perspective’s insistence on examining how state and social systems perpetuate victimization is not a theoretical luxury in this context; it is a practical necessity for any meaningful reform.

From crime victims to human rights: where the scope stands today 🔗

Victimology today occupies a fundamentally different intellectual space than it did in the 1940s. Andrew Karmen broadly defined victimology as the study of victimization, victim-offender relationships, victim interactions with the criminal justice system, victim relationships with media, the cost of crime to victims, and victim roles in social movements – a definition that already signals how far the field had moved from its original focus on victim typologies.

The most current understanding goes further still. Victimology now intersects with human rights law, international criminal justice (including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which incorporates an innovative system of justice by recognizing the rights of victims), restorative justice, and emerging areas like cyber-victimization and environmental harm. Each of these domains requires the discipline to ask not just “who committed this crime?” but “what structural conditions made this harm possible, and how must justice respond to the person who suffered it?”

The conservative, liberal, and radical-critical perspectives are not competing schools that will eventually resolve into one winner. They represent genuinely different answers to the question of what victimology is for. Understanding all three – their assumptions, their strengths, and their blind spots – is essential for anyone working within or reforming a criminal justice system.

What do you think? If victimology’s radical-critical perspective is correct that state systems can themselves be agents of victimization, what institutional mechanisms should exist to hold them accountable – and is India’s current legal framework adequate to that task? And at what point does expanding the definition of “victim” risk diluting the concept to the point where it loses analytical value?

References

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