The Just World Theory Of Criminology

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Victim precipitation refers to the theory of criminology where a victim of crime is believed to have provoked or incited the acts of the offender. This theory is mostly associated with crimes such as rape, assault, robbery and homicide.
Victim precipitation was first made known by Criminologist Marvin Wolfgang in his 1957 article “Victim precipitated criminal homicide”. Wolfgang states the term victim precipitated is applied to criminal homicides where the victim is a direct, positive precipitator to the crime. The role of the victim is characterized by “his having been the first in the homicide drama to use physical force directed against his subsequent slayer.” (Wolfgang, 1957)
In 1968 Criminologist Menachem Amir’s primary research was regarding …show more content…

Some writers for example Jones and Aronson (1973), have used this to hypnotize that “respectable” rape victims would be blamed more than less respectable victims. They based this hypothesis on a need to seek extra justification to explain why what appears to be an unfair fate would occur to a respectable individual. (McCaul, Veltum, Boyechko, & Crawford, 1990)
This has lead to societies belief system in rape myths, statements such as “she was asking for it” or asking what the victim was wearing or how much they had to drink at the time of the assault creates an attitude towards sexual assault and reinforces the myth that offenders cannot control their sexual urges when multiple studies prove that sexual assault has nothing to do with sexual urges and everything to do with power and …show more content…

News coverage portrayed the offenders as good boys with promising futures that had now been tarnished by these allegations. The school was also rumoured to have taken part in a cover up of evidence to protect the offenders. This became national news in the US when the New York Times ran an extensive piece on the offenders in this case and only talked about the affect on the victim in the last few paragraphs, Anonymous, the hacker group got involved after this and leaked all the information about the offenders and the cover up that took place making the case international news. (Roesch, 2013)
Sexual assault and rape are a serious epidemic in today’s society; statistics show that one in five women will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in their lives. (United Nations Development Fund for Women, 2008). And the reporting of sexual assault to the police is exceptionally low and few offenders are successfully prosecuted this leads to a lack of support and education within the community. (Madeleine van der Bruggen,

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