ABSTRACT
Empirical victimology is concerned both with the study of people’s experiences of crime victimisation and of the people who experience crime victimisation (i.e. victims). As such, it is fraught with conceptual problems, though many of these often tend to be overlooked or remain unexamined in empirical research. Most forms of social activity involve people interacting with their environment, and crime victimisation is no exception. Each crime victimisation event is embedded within, and sets in train, complex webs of social action and meaning, stretching backwards and forwards in time for the people involved, and intersecting with the lives of others. Crime events also occur in specific instances of space-time – including ‘cyberspace’. Yet we cannot readily observe the complexities and ramifications of these events and their settings – not just in the sense of being unable to observe people’s motives towards them or their interpretations of them, but even being able to capture the full complexity of the systems of social interaction that converge upon and are brought about by the act itself. So, the data that we have to work with are typically only partial selections from these complexities, focusing on limited slices of time-space in which such events occur and, at any one time, usually upon only one of the many parties to the event – in this case, the crime’s immediate victim. Inevitably, then, there are considerable difficulties of interpretation and inference, including problems of partiality, bias and distortion, raised by the essential selectivity of the available data.
