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Relationship Between Sellin And Wolfgang's Typology Of Victimization

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INTRODUCTION
Over the course of history, multiple theories have been developed over time to determine the relationship between the offender and the victim. One of these theories is Sellin and Wolfgang’s Typology of Victimization, which states that victims are subjected to their victimization depending on the situations that they are in. “With the emergence and popularity of positivism, criminals were assumed to be differentiated from others in the population...appeared logically consistent with this stance...Scarcely mentioned in that work is the would-be victim as an active agent making choices that affect criminal opportunity—instead, in these theories, criminals made their own opportunities,” (Berg and Schreck 2022). This meant that theories …show more content…

Sellin and Wolfgang’s theory likely gained this traction for not faulting the victim for a crime, as there would have been little to no observable or statistical information proving that offenders and victims had connectable behavior. On the other hand, it would be easy for scholars to observe that offenders behaved differently from victims through their knowledge of the offender previously committing a crime, proving their reasonable belief that offenders are completely different from victims and are solely responsible for a crime. Due to the rise of positivism, Sellin and Wolfgang’s Typology of Victimization, a theory based on victimization through situations the victim is put in, rose in credibility and usage by many scholars to determine the relationship between the offender …show more content…

Through victim blaming, society and the criminal justice process holds the victim accountable for the charges that are being pressed against the offender despite them having no fault. In many cases, victim blaming even contributes to the criminal justice process not occurring at all. An example of this would be in cases of sexual assault and rape. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “nearly 80 percent of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported...The reality is, it’s very common for sexual assault survivors - most frequently, women - to decline to report the offense to police,” (Kimble 2018). In fact, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN, found that only 5.3% of rape and sexual assault offenders will face any prosecution at all, with only 2.5% being imprisoned for their crimes. RAINN also found that the main reason a survivor chose not to report their crime was due to them fearing retaliation from the offender and society through means like being blamed for the crimes committed against them, with 20% of cases being this way. This high rate of fear that survivors have of being blamed by society has prevented criminal prosecution from taking place against rape and sexual assault

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