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News nº
16
September 2010
(Visite a edição completa)
Open Space
Propensity towards Victimization: is it possible to diminish it?
In an attempt to systemize what has been done, on a world level, on the topic of victimization(1), issues relating to this matter have been relatively understudied in Portugal(2).

The distinct types of media have shown a growing interest on the dissemination of news involving individuals who have experienced different types of victimization: examples include the victims of social exclusion, the moving documentaries about the relatives of victims of tragic accidents or natural catastrophes, such as the landslide in Ribeira Quente, in the Azores, on 31 October 1997, or the fall of the Entre-os-Rios bridge on 5 March 2001, and also the victims of crimes, from the most ordinary to the most bizarre. Such strategies, in connection with the audience ratings they attract, suggest a collective interest on the topic, and, particularly, on the viewing of the consequences of experiencing victimization in general(3).

Living the experiences of victimization, as well as merely seeing, in the media, strangers falling victim of deplorable situations, and the consequences of victimization scenes, are perceived, from an interactionist stance(4), as learning experiences that may act as preventive measures. Besides, the police’s strategy of regularly disseminating police occurrences is founded on the principle of general prevention that encourages fewer new victims.

We do not believe that those reactions are either universal or linear. An array of questions come up, namely: how to explain that particular people have been systematically and repeatedly victim of criminal behaviours and done practically nothing to avoid it? And how can people without a past of victimization, and without resorting to major preventive measures, go on through time with a low probability of being victimized? And why do better-informed people who see more television programmes about criminal matters show smaller propensity to being victims of a crime? If this is the case, why is it that knowledge of fear discourse increases the fear of falling victim to a crime “awaiting on every corner” (5), when knowledge leads to prevention and to a reduction of the probability of victimization?

On the other hand, there are theories that demonstrate that the victim is guilty, albeit only in part. To this effect, Mendelson (1947), considered to be the forerunner of victimology, started by identifying the victim’s level of guilt, classifying him or her either as totally innocent or totally guilty, ranging from a victim with intermediary guilt, to the victim less guilty than the aggressor, and to the victim guiltier than the aggressor.

Mendelson’s theory about victim classification with regard the level of guilt cannot be seen as an attempt to reduce the guilt level of the aggressor. This is despite the fact that, in the context of the victim-aggressor relationship, the victim is often seen as the guilty party in a victimization episode, a strategy very frequently adopted by defendants of suspects of crimes of rape(6) .

For centuries, victims, in addition to being subject to criminal behaviour, despised, and eternally neglected by legal systems, have been the target of other forms of violence, starting with the actual institutional violence at the level of treatment, and the systematic obligation of revisiting and verbal reproduction, often corporal, of the their ordeal.

Having presented a brief overview of the concerns associated to victimization, for which there are no definite answers yet, the fact that there is ample room for studying victims cannot be denied, particularly by means of a preventive strategy, where two intervention areas stand out: to intervene on the victims so as to minimize the psychological, physical, and economic impact, and to intervene to avoid the occurrence of conditions enabling the act of victimization.

Besides everything that our imagination can offer us on this matter, we believe that, beyond the traditional lament for the act of victimization, mostly due to the psychological trauma, a lot still remains to be done, even if, in the process, we need to go back to the roots(7)!


Alberto Peixoto
acrpeixoto@sapo.pt
_________

(1)The studies of the German criminologist Von Hentig on victims date from 1948. CUSSON, Maurice, Criminologia, Casa das Letras, Cruz Quebrada, 2006, p.163.
(2) It must be pointed out that after the Inquérito de Vitimação de 1994, the only survey made on a national scale, only in March 2009, fifteen years later, there was a political decision to carry out a new national survey on this problem. (Information available on 18/Mar/2009, at http://www.aps.pt/cms/docs_prv/docs/DPR49253f37e581c_1.pdf )
(3) RAMONET, Ignacio, A Tirania da Comunicação, Campo das Letras, Porto, 1999.
(4)COOK, 1986; SKOGAN, 1987; VAN DIJK, 1994, em CUSSON, Maurice, Criminologia, Casa das Letras, Cruz Quebrada, 2006, p.185.
(6) MACHADO, Carla, Crime e Insegurança – Discursos do Medo Imagens do Outro, Editorial Notícias, Lisboa, 2004, p. 254.
(7) HINDELANG et al, Victims of Personal Crime, An Empirical Foundation for a Theory of Personal Victimization, Cambridge, Mass., Bailinger, 1978.
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