The Main Trends in the Evolution of Victimology as a Branch of Criminology and the Science of Crime Victim

Abstract

The article discusses the basic concepts of the formation of the modern theory of criminological victimology. The author conducted a historical analysis of the origin of victimology as a science of crime victim, as a branch of criminology as an independent discipline and subject areas singled victimological research. Victim ideas are born thousands of years ago. Self-protection of the potential victim at the dawn of mankind has been the main method of impact on crime. Then, as the emergence and development of other mechanisms of influence on the social evil of self-defense has moved into the category of specific problems. The state and society, trying to protect the identity, developed other measures that did not require the victim to participate in their implementation, and this figure is a kind of «lost» in the criminological analysis that focused on phenomena such as delinquency, crime, criminal. However, most of the legal systems included the right to self-defense, which was the legal support of the potential victim. In XX century, representatives of the scientific direction, called «interactionism», conducted an audit of all crime factors. Their attention was not lost and the significant role of the victim in the process of criminalization of the individual. Fragmentary research on the role of the victim in the genesis of crime made by many scientists and writers. In the book «Criminology» Sutherland E the third chapter devoted to the analysis of crime victims. These statistics showed them that the highest probability of becoming a victim of murder in those aged 25–30 years, regardless of sex and race. The probability of becoming a victim of crime in the Negro in the United States is 100 times higher than that of the representatives of other nationalities. Italian writer Annie Vivant in one of his stories held a motivational analysis of the personality of a serial killer. Vivant described an episode in the life of this maniac, when the optimal behavior of his sacrifice saved the life. Lure women to the country, the maniac began to prepare for her murder. At this point, the woman herself demanded that he killed her (intuition told her that the only way to salvation). Such unusual behavior of women discouraged maniac who used to get pleasure from the kind of trembling victim, the victim is saved. In 1941, a German criminologist Herbert von Hentig, hiding from the Nazis in the US, published an interesting article «Remarks on the Interaction of Perpetrator and Victim». After seven years of his pen monograph «The Criminal and His Victim (Studies in the Sociobiology of Crime)». Inspired by the interactionist approach, N. Hentig remained under the strong influence of German biopsychic criminological school. Victim issues in his book was dedicated only the last part, which is called "Victim" (in the first part investigated the problem of the body structure as a factor of crime dealt with in the second-tsiobiologicheskie elements of the crime, in the third – the geography of the crime problem). Victim ideas attracted the attention of many scientists.