Who are Americas Violent Crime Victims?
Recent data on lifetime likelihood of crime victimization reinforce the notion that nobody living in America is completely free from the risk of becoming a crime victim. While crime victim-related research of 40 and 50 years ago examined the characteristics of victims, much of it approached the issue from the perspective of “shared responsibility,” that is how crime victims were, in part, “responsible” for their victimization. In recent decades, the paradigm has shifted. The study of the characteristics of crime victims has tended to focus on identifying risk factors in order to better understand the phenomena, without attributing blame to the victims. Information about the risk for victimization has been used to develop crime prevention and enforcement strategies. Research indicates that there is a host of individual, situational, and community-level factors that increase risk of criminal victimization (see Sampson & Lauritsen, 1994, for a comprehensive review). Note: The following ma
