NCJ Number
76110
Journal
Soviet Law and Government Volume: 15 Issue: 3 Dated: (Winter 1976-1977) Pages: 70-84
Date Published
1976
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This Russian article offers a general view of the ideas underlying the new field of victimology and evaluates their theoretical and practical significance in the struggle against crime in terms of certain victimological studies carried out in the Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR).
Abstract
Victimology directs its major attention to the need for comprehensive consideration of the existence of a victim and to the interpersonal relations involved prior to, during, and after the commission of a crime. Victimology is particularly interested in the victim who exhibits 'deviant behavior.' Familiarity with criminal cases, study of criminal statistics, and identification of the causes and conditions facilitating the commission of crimes make it possible to conclude that many crimes are, to a certain degree, due to the behavior of the victims themselves. This conclusion can lead to the development of special, nontraditional measures to prevent crime, directed at preventing negligent, risky, or provocative behavior by a person which may prove dangerous to that individual. New forms of prevention may be oriented both to warding off 'recidivism' on the part of persons who have already been victims and to identifying and warning potential victims whose behavior and lifestyle create criminogenic and victimogenic situations. However, the study of victims and the problems of the crime must include two fundamental interconnected propositions: (1) many crimes might not have been committed if the victims of those crimes had conducted themselves properly (according to one study in the Tadzhik SSR such persons comprised about 25 percent of all victims); and (2) regardless of the role they played in the commission of a crime, victims have to be taken into consideration, studied, and be given the necessary assistance. In Soviet victimology, the victim is defined as a person or a specific community of persons in any form in which they may be integrated to whom moral, physical, or financial harm has been done. The paper discusses the prevention of victimization as an approach to reduction of crime, classifies victimological studies of bourgeois jurists (researchers in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan), and reviews empirical victimological studies conducted in the Tadzhik SSR. The observation is made that relationships discovered in the Tadzhik research showed that the crime, the criminal, and the victim actually make up a unitary structure from which the characteristics of the victim cannot be excluded without distorting the picture of crime as a whole. A total of 11 notes are supplied.