ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to get a sense of criminology as an academic subject. In order to do this we shall explore some features of the origins of the discipline and how those features still influence what it is that criminologists do and do not do contemporarily. In particular this chapter will explore popular media images of criminologists and offer good reasons as to why those images are misplaced. In order to do this we shall explore the historical development of criminology, and its sister discipline, victimology. This exploration will help us understand how the boundaries of the discipline have been set and who is included and excluded by those historical boundaries. At the end of this chapter we shall use a case study, that of the UK serial murderer Harold Shipman, to establish the extent to which the boundaries of criminological and victimological knowledge can help us make sense of such behaviour.
