Victim Precipitation
Definition
The discredited idea, associated with Von Hentig and Mendelsohn, that victims bear some responsibility for their own victimisation through their behaviour or characteristics. The concept has been criticised for shifting blame from offenders to victims.
- Originators
- Von Hentig and Mendelsohn
- Status
- Discredited, heavily criticised concept
- Core criticism
- Shifts blame from offender to victim
- Field
- Early, now-superseded victimology theory
Common questions
Why is victim precipitation still covered if it has been discredited?+
It is taught historically to show how early victimology theory framed victims as contributing to their own harm, and to explain why that framing was later rejected in favour of offender-focused and opportunity-based explanations.
What replaced victim precipitation in modern victimology?+
Frameworks such as routine activities theory and lifestyle exposure theory, which analyse patterns of opportunity and access that make certain people or situations more exposed to offenders, without attributing causal blame to the victim.
Related terms
- Completely Innocent Victim
- Mendelsohn's first category: a victim selected by chance or by an offender's premeditation, with no contribution from the victim's own conduct, such...
- Intimate Partner Victimisation
- Violence or abuse committed by a current or former spouse, partner or dating partner, a relationship category with markedly lower reporting rates...
- Provocative Victim
- A victim whose own conduct, such as an insult, a threat or a first strike, triggered the offender's response; positioned midway along...
- Repeat Victimisation
- The empirical pattern in which a small proportion of people or locations experience a disproportionate share of violent incidents. Domestic violence shows...
- Routine Activity Theory
- A criminological framework developed by Cohen and Felson (1979) that explains property crime as the product of three converging elements: a motivated...
- Secondary Victimisation
- Additional harm caused to a victim through the process of reporting and investigation, such as disbelief, insensitive questioning, or retraumatisation. Fear of...
- Strangers vs Acquaintances
- The relationship-distance axis used across victimology and criminal justice statistics to separate offences between people who did not know each other from...
- Victim Blaming
- Attributing moral responsibility for a crime to the victim's character or conduct rather than to the offender's decision to act, a normative...
- Victim Impact Statement
- A written or oral account submitted by a victim (or victim's family) describing the physical, psychological, financial, and social effects of the...
- Victimology
- The sub-field of criminology that studies crime victims: their characteristics, the victim-offender relationship, the impacts of victimisation, and the adequacy of legal...
Explained in these topics
- Foundations of Victimology
- Victim-Offender Relationship and Victim TypologiesA description of cases in which the victim's own action, such as a first physical blow, initiated the sequence that led to the offence; a behavioural finding,...