ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of the victim throughout history and will trace the elimination of the victim from the social processing of criminal acts. It explains how victimology emerged and investigates the resurgence of interest in the victim. Victim precipitation deals with the degree to which the victim is responsible for his or her own victimization. That involvement may be either passive as much of von Hentig’s typology suggests or active as in Mendelsohn’s classification. Each typology implicates victim contribution as a causative factor in the commission of a crime. However, the first systematic attempt to provide empirical support of this argument was Wolfgang’s analysis of police homicide records. Central to critical victimology is the issue of how and why certain actions are defined as criminal and, as a result, how the entire field of victimology becomes focused on one set of actions instead of another.
