What Ideas of Victimization and Vulnerability Mean for Criminological Theory

Abstract

This paper examines an intellectual orthodoxy among criminological theories, namely their preoccupation with the offender and the exclusion of any mention of the victim. We show that any theory of crime in fact can define two related ideas about the victim, here called ideas of victimization and vulnerability, fixing their meaning and producing a constellation of testable predictions about their empirical properties. We then conduct a theoretical exercise contrasting how the internal logic of substantive positivist theories and choice theories would specify these ideas. We found that substantive positivism is not only the probable source of the aforementioned intellectual orthodoxy, but it also generates predictions about victimization and vulnerability that are inconsistent with the known facts. Choice theories, in contrast, incentivize scholars to attend to the victim and are able to make predictions that not only are consistent with known facts but that also suggest rich possibilities for the future growth of theory and research. Consideration of these ideas have important implications for falsifying longstanding criminological perspectives, by casting doubt on any crime theory that is unable to make believable empirical predictions about victimization and vulnerability.