Essay On Victim Precipitation

Victim precipitation refers to the role or responsibility that a victim has in their own victimization. In the first generation of victimization theories and victimologist the idea of victim precipitation was studied and thought to be a piece of the whole picture of a crime committed. As time progressed it was not thought to be as much as a factor.

Victim precipitation is separated into two different categories: victim facilitation and victim provocation. Victim facilitation being instances where the victim "facilitated" the crime by creating the opportunity, such as: walking around late at night in dangerous areas, going to the ATM and withdrawing large amounts of money at unsafe times or places, getting intoxicated and diminishing one's own capacity to protect themselves. In all these cases someone is more easily a target or a victim because of a situation they put themselves in making it easier to be taken advantage of. Victim provocation is an even more active role in potential victimization. Provocation is when the victim overtly entices or antagonizes their perpetrator. This could again go along with intoxication when someone is provoking or pushing the buttons of someone else to the point that they provoke violence from the second party.

Marvin Wolfgang even believed that a victim precipitation was a mitigating circumstance in criminal homicide in some situations. Wolfgang gives a long list of actual homicides recorded by the Philadelphia Police were the victim was the primary aggressor and usually the initial aggressor but ended up dying during the altercation with the other party. During the study that produced those examples Wolfgang found the 26% of the homicides in a several year period were found to have v...

... middle of paper ...

...he specific group he was looking at. The biggest factor in what Amir reported to be victim precipitation cases was the use of alcohol.

I think that there is a difference between the term victim precipitation and victim blaming but it is easy to blur those lines. Victim precipitation is not necessarily blaming the victim for the crime they were a victim of but merely looking at how their actions influenced or provided the opportunity for the crime. In some crimes such as homicide this may be possibly used as a mitigation circumstance for the offender. For example: if someone is a victim of homicide because they attacked another and then were killed while the second party was defending themselves this would be a mitigating circumstance for the offender. Victim blaming simply places fault on the victim for what happened and comes across much more negatively.