Chapter 24: Approaches to Victims and Victimisation∗

Paul Rock

Approaches to victims and victimisation∗ Most discussions of approaches to victimisation, sometimes lumped together and called victimology, begin with the declaration that they are too intellectually thin and underdeveloped to be called a theory, 1 and there is a temptation, to which I shall also succumb, to devote space to speculating on why that should be so. Theory, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , is ‘A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; … a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.’ Social theory, adds Marshall (1994), ‘embraces a set of interrelated definitions and relationships that organises our concepts of and understanding of the empirical world in a systematic way’. It would be difficult to argue that there is a fully coherent victimological theory in ...

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