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For much of its early history, criminology treated the victim as a background figure—a passive target, a witness, or a source of data about the offender. The question of what role the victim plays in the criminal event itself, or how social structures shape who becomes a victim, was largely unasked. Victimology emerged to fill that gap, and its development has been driven by a series of competing answers to a single stubborn problem: should the victim be understood as a participant in crime, a target of opportunity, a product of inequality, or a central stakeholder in justice? Each major framework has offered a different answer, and the field today is marked by a productive tension between these perspectives.
The first systematic attempt to place the victim at the center of criminological inquiry came from what is now called Positivist Victimology. Developed primarily in the 1940s through the 1960s by scholars such as Hans von Hentig, Benjamin Mendelsohn, and Marvin Wolfgang, this framework drew on the methods and assumptions of the broader Positivist School in criminology. Its central move was to argue that victims are not merely passive recipients of crime but often play an active role in the dynamics that lead to victimization. Von Hentig's typology of victim types—such as the young, the elderly, or the depressed—suggested that certain personal characteristics made individuals more prone to becoming victims. Mendelsohn coined the term "victimology" itself and developed a classification of victims based on their degree of culpability, ranging from the completely innocent to the most guilty.
Positivist Victimology's distinctive contribution was to open up the victim-offender relationship as a subject of empirical study. Its preferred methods were case studies, clinical interviews, and the construction of typologies. The framework narrowed the field's focus to individual traits and interpersonal dynamics, largely ignoring the broader social context. This focus on victim precipitation—the idea that a victim's actions might provoke or encourage an offender—proved controversial. Critics argued that it risked blaming victims for the crimes committed against them. Yet the framework's insistence that victims are not irrelevant to the crime event itself was a necessary first step. It established victimology as a distinct area of inquiry, even as later frameworks would reject its individualistic assumptions.
By the 1970s, a new generation of victimologists shifted the focus from individual traits to the everyday situations and routines that expose people to risk. This shift was made possible by the development of large-scale victimization surveys, most notably the National Crime Victimization Survey in the United States. These surveys revealed that victimization was not randomly distributed but clustered in predictable patterns of time, place, and social activity. Two closely related frameworks emerged from this empirical foundation: Lifestyle Exposure Theory and Routine Activities Theory.
Lifestyle Exposure Theory, developed by Michael Hindelang, Michael Gottfredson, and James Garofalo in 1978, argued that the risk of victimization is tied to an individual's lifestyle. People who spend more time in public spaces at night, who associate with offenders, or who engage in activities that put them in vulnerable situations face higher risks. The framework absorbed the empirical findings of victimization surveys and replaced the clinical, typological approach of Positivist Victimology with a more sociological, pattern-seeking method. It treated victimization as a product of routine social behavior rather than individual pathology.
Routine Activities Theory, formulated by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson in 1979, extended this logic into a general explanation of crime rates. It argued that a criminal event requires the convergence in time and space of three elements: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. The theory was not designed to explain why individuals become offenders but to explain how the structure of everyday life creates opportunities for crime. It coexists with Lifestyle Exposure Theory as a complementary framework, with Routine Activities offering a more abstract, situational model and Lifestyle Exposure focusing on individual-level risk factors. Both frameworks narrowed the scope of victimology to the immediate circumstances of crime, setting aside questions of structural inequality or state power. They remain highly influential today, particularly in environmental criminology and crime prevention research.
At the same time that Lifestyle Exposure and Routine Activities were gaining traction, a very different set of frameworks emerged from the critical and feminist movements of the 1970s. These frameworks rejected the positivist and situational approaches for ignoring the role of power, inequality, and the state in shaping victimization.
Critical Victimology, drawing on conflict and critical criminology, argued that victimization is not a neutral category but is constructed by the state and by powerful social groups. It focused on how the criminal justice system defines some harms as crimes while ignoring others, such as corporate violence, state violence, or environmental harm. Critical Victimology also examined how the state's response to victims is shaped by class interests, often privileging victims of street crime while neglecting victims of systemic injustice. Its methods are primarily theoretical and structural, analyzing how law, policy, and ideology produce and manage victimhood. This framework directly challenged Positivist Victimology's focus on individual victim-offender interaction, arguing that such a focus obscures the larger structures that generate harm.
Feminist Victimology developed in parallel with Critical Victimology but with a distinct focus on gender and patriarchy. While Critical Victimology centered class and state power, Feminist Victimology argued that gender is a fundamental axis of victimization that had been ignored by both mainstream and critical approaches. Feminist scholars such as Liz Kelly and Jill Radford documented the prevalence of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other forms of violence against women, showing that these were not rare events but systematic features of patriarchal social organization. Feminist Victimology also critiqued the criminal justice system for its failure to respond adequately to women's victimization, from police non-intervention to courtroom practices that revictimized survivors. The framework's methods include qualitative interviews, activism, and policy analysis. It coexists with Critical Victimology as a sibling framework, sharing a structural critique of power but disagreeing on the primacy of class versus gender. Over time, Feminist Victimology has arguably become the more influential of the two, shaping legal reforms, police training, and support services for victims.
In the 1980s, a group of British criminologists—including Jock Young, John Lea, and Roger Matthews—developed Left Realist Victimology as an attempt to bridge the gap between structural critique and empirical research. Left Realism emerged from a dissatisfaction with both the situational focus of Routine Activities Theory and the purely theoretical orientation of Critical Victimology. Its proponents argued that critical criminologists had ceded the study of street crime to the political right by dismissing it as a distraction from more serious state harms. Left Realist Victimology insisted that working-class communities suffer disproportionately from everyday crimes like burglary, robbery, and assault, and that any progressive criminology must take this victimization seriously.
The framework's distinctive contribution was to combine victimization surveys with a structural analysis of inequality. Left Realists conducted local surveys that asked victims about their experiences, their fear of crime, and their attitudes toward the police. They argued that the fear of crime in poor communities was not irrational but grounded in real patterns of victimization. Left Realist Victimology absorbed the empirical methods of Lifestyle Exposure and Routine Activities but placed them within a critical framework that emphasized the role of relative deprivation, marginalization, and policing. The framework was most influential in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s, but its influence waned as Feminist Victimology and more globalized critical perspectives gained prominence. Its empirical emphasis on local victimization surveys, however, was absorbed into community safety research and remains a methodological legacy.
Beginning in the 1990s, Restorative Justice emerged as a framework that fundamentally reframed the victim's role in the justice process. Unlike the explanatory frameworks that preceded it, Restorative Justice is primarily a practice-oriented model. It argues that the conventional criminal justice system sidelines victims by treating crime as an offense against the state rather than against individuals and communities. Restorative Justice seeks to bring victims, offenders, and community members together in processes—such as victim-offender mediation, family group conferences, and peacemaking circles—to collectively address the harm caused by crime.
The framework's relationship to earlier victimology is complex. It shares with Positivist Victimology an interest in the victim-offender relationship, but it rejects the idea of victim precipitation or culpability. Instead, it treats the victim as a stakeholder with legitimate needs for information, participation, and reparation. Restorative Justice also coexists with Feminist Victimology, though not without tension. Feminist critics have raised concerns that restorative processes may be inappropriate for cases of domestic violence or sexual assault, where power imbalances can undermine the victim's safety and voice. Proponents argue that restorative processes can be designed to empower victims if properly facilitated. Restorative Justice has transformed victimology by shifting attention from explaining victimization to responding to it, and it remains an active and contested framework today.
Victimology today is not dominated by a single framework but is characterized by a pluralism of approaches that coexist, sometimes in productive tension and sometimes in outright disagreement. The most influential frameworks in current research and policy are Routine Activities Theory, Feminist Victimology, and Restorative Justice, each occupying a different niche.
Routine Activities Theory remains the dominant explanatory framework in environmental criminology and crime prevention. Its strength lies in its parsimony and its direct applicability to situational crime prevention, hotspot policing, and urban design. It is less useful, however, for explaining victimization that arises from structural inequality, such as domestic violence or hate crime, where the concept of a "suitable target" can seem to blame the victim.
Feminist Victimology has become the leading framework for understanding gender-based violence and for shaping policy responses. Its influence is visible in legal reforms, victim support services, and university curricula. It overlaps with Critical Victimology in its attention to power, but it has largely supplanted Critical Victimology's class-centric focus in mainstream victimology. The two frameworks agree that victimization is socially constructed and shaped by inequality, but they disagree on whether gender or class is the primary axis of that inequality.
Restorative Justice has transformed the practical landscape of victimology, creating new roles for victims in the justice process. It coexists with both explanatory and critical frameworks, but its relationship to them is one of complementarity rather than direct competition. A researcher might use Routine Activities Theory to explain patterns of burglary and then draw on Restorative Justice principles to design a response. A feminist scholar might critique restorative processes for their potential to revictimize women while also advocating for their reform.
The major disagreement that persists in victimology is between situational and structural explanations. Routine Activities Theory and Lifestyle Exposure Theory focus on the immediate circumstances of crime, while Critical and Feminist Victimologies insist that those circumstances are themselves products of larger social forces. This is not a disagreement that can be resolved by one framework absorbing the other; rather, it reflects a fundamental difference in what each framework considers the most important question to ask. Victimology today is a field where both questions are asked, often by the same researchers using different methods for different purposes. The field's vitality comes from this ongoing tension, and students of victimology are best served by learning to move between these frameworks rather than choosing one as the single truth.