CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF VICTIMOLOGICAL THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
Keywords:
Victimology, Positivist, Radical, Critical, Feminism, Left RealismAbstract
This paper critically assesses the strengths and limitations of different theoretical victimological paradigms. In doing so it relied on secondary sources of data such as published research works, journal articles, textbooks, internet-based materials, among others. Although there are significant controversies over what constitutes victimisation and how victims should be handled, there are two major perspectives in victimology: the positivist and the anti-positivist paradigms. Positivist paradigm concerns itself with distinguishing victims who in some way could be responsible for their victimisation and the recognition of personal and situational factors which engender a uniform pattern of victimisation. The anti-positivist paradigm facilitates an understanding of the nature of victimisation perpetrated against susceptible classes by the state and society. The positivist perspective focuses on victim proneness, victim precipitation, victim culpability, relies mainly on quantitative methods and pursues a legalistic conception of crime. The anti-positivist perspective focuses attention on the life experiences of the victims of crime, the actions of the state, the impacts of victimisation on vulnerable groups, relies mainly on qualitative methods and looks at crime from a wider prism. In conclusion, this paper submits that efforts at developing more comprehensive theories of victimology, should focus on the multifactorial dimensions of victimhood and victimisation, because crime has divergent, multifactorial, and complex dimensions. Unfortunately, current paradigms are entrapped with the problem of focusing on one dimension of victimisation and victimhood, while standing alone. However, the trajectory of the criminal justice process has been transformed by the aggregation of these paradigms. Nonetheless, victimology needs to create a single theoretical framework which must describe accurately all related events without using random elements and must predict all relevant future events accurately.