ABSTRACT
Almost any discussion of theoretical perspectives on victimisation (which I shall clump together and call victimology) tends to begin with the pronouncement that they are intellectually thin and underdeveloped,1 and there is a temptation, to which I shall also succumb, to devote space to speculating on why that should be so. Theory, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; … a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed’. Social theory, adds Marshall (1994), ‘embraces a set of interrelated definitions and relationships that organizes our concepts of and understanding of the empirical world in a systematic way’. It would be difficult to argue that there is a fully coherent victimological theory in that sense, and, at the very outset, it should perhaps be observed that there is no good reason why so diverse and complex an entity as victims and victimisation should or could be covered by one consolidated set of arguments. Helen Reeves, first the director and then the chief executive officer of Victim Support, the largest voluntary organisation for victims in England and Wales, and as knowledgeable as anyone about the field, once remarked that to search for a single theory or description of victims and victimisation would be quite as quixotic as a search for a single theory or description of criminals and crime. But there is more that can be said about the theoretically emaciated state of victimology, and, in saying it, one may begin to learn something interesting about the intellectual world centred on the victim.
