Definition
Victimology is the subfield of criminology that studies people who have been harmed by crime: who they are, how often and how they are victimised, how they are treated by the justice system and by wider society, and how the harm might be repaired. It is criminology's mirror-image discipline — the field that emerges when you flip the spotlight from offender to harmed.
The term was coined by Benjamin Mendelsohn in the 1940s and developed by Hans von Hentig in The Criminal and His Victim (1948). It became institutionalised through victim-survey methodology in the 1970s, through feminist work on rape and domestic violence, and through the restorative-justice and victims-rights movements from the 1980s onward.
Why it matters
How it works
Victimological research uses three main instruments: official records, victimisation surveys (such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales or the U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey), and qualitative work with survivors. These tools have repeatedly shown that crime is not evenly distributed — young men in poor neighbourhoods are the most frequent victims of street crime; women bear disproportionate burdens of domestic and sexual violence; certain ethnic and migrant groups face heightened hate-crime risk.
Conceptually the field has moved beyond a simple ideal-victim model (Nils Christie's blameless, vulnerable, sympathetic figure) to recognise that real victims are often complicated — sometimes prior offenders, sometimes still in danger, sometimes reluctant to participate in the formal system. Modern victimology also studies victims of state crime, corporate harm, and human-rights violations, integrating zemiology, feminist theory, and transitional-justice scholarship.