ABSTRACT
In 1976, I contributed a sociological paper to Professor Viano's collection, Victims and Society, titled "Some Conceptual Issues in the Social Identification of 'Victims' and 'Offenders"'. That paper was largely programmatic, trading mainly on illustrative materials, and was intended to introduce an analytic apparatus for examining the concepts 'victim' and 'offender' as descriptions or identifications for persons in ordinary everyday language which are avowed and imputed by society members according to various social conventions and procedures, some of which I briefly outlined in that paper. The conceptual issues to which I referred are not simply issues concerning analysts' concepts; they are issues firmly grounded in society members' own culturally-based conceptual work in identifying 'victims' and 'offenders', and therefore in using those terms.
