ABSTRACT
Criminology refers to the study of the nature, extent, causes and consequences of acts and omissions that are proscribed by a region's criminal code. It also includes inquiries and considerations of our individual and collective responses to harmful and lawbreaking behaviour; the meaning of crime to those who engage in such behaviour and are affected by it; and the ways in which crime is depicted, described, discussed and portrayed by the media. Like criminal justice, victimology is a relatively recent field, tracing its origins to the mid-twentieth-century work of Hans von Hentig and Benjamin Mendelsohn. A notion of criminological theory that includes ideas about interpretation, in addition to explanation and prediction – indeed, a criminology that is a marriage of humanistic and scientific ways of thinking about crime – is one that we find more robust, rewarding and, well, interesting.
