ABSTRACT
Criminologists have not always been concerned with the victims of crime. The origin of interest in the victims of crime—victimology—can be traced to the efforts of researchers in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Wallace and Roberson, 2011). More extensive development of victimology as a criminological specialty emerged during the victim’s rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Interest in victimology also spread with the broader emergence of the restorative justice perspective within criminology. As with other criminological specialties, victimology incorporates a well-developed or identifiable literature that includes typological approaches, theories of victimization, and efforts to count victims of crime. And, like many other areas of criminological research, victimology has tended to exclude an examination of the relationship between power and victimization. That neglect has meant that the major studies of victimology and major textbooks on this topic (for example, Karmen, 2010) exclude the examination of victims of corporate, white collar, state, and environmental crimes. Given the history of criminology and its focus on street crime or the crimes of the powerless, it is completely possible to understand why victimology has excluded the crimes of the powerful and the victims of the powerful from its research program.
