ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the absence of the homeless victim: absent from popular consciousness and the criminal justice system, as well as absent from academic theory. A brief chronology of studies of victimisation indicates that victimology was born in North America in the 1940s, parented by positivist criminology and concerned to map the characteristics that defined and predicted victim status. The chapter considers the case of the homeless victim that challenges us to question the direction of the criminological gaze which has largely been directed either towards the homeless as victims of social circumstance, or towards homelessness as a crimogenic phenomenon, but rarely at the homeless person as a victim of crime. The assertion that 'the status of autonomous political actor becomes derived from the recognition of one's common situation as victims' is persuasive in general terms but tells us little of those who are excluded from the body politic.
