There are no crimes without victims, just as there are no crimes without a criminal. The true measure of crimes is the harm they cause to society. According to scientists-criminologists, a victim is any person who has suffered moral, physical, or property damage from a wrongful act, regardless of whether he or she is duly recognized as a victim of this crime or not (Jubaer et al., 2021). In other words, a person is a victim even before he or she goes to law enforcement agencies and is recognized as a victim.
Victims may be considered as re-victimized as they go through the criminal justice process. This legal procedure links the concept of a victim not with the fact of committing a crime but with the procedural consolidation of the victim’s status by a decision of an inquiry officer, investigator, or court (Walklate, 2019). However, the figure of the victim appears much earlier than the inquirer, investigator, or court recognizes him or her as such. Therefore, in addition to the criminal procedure, there is a criminal legal status of the victim. There is a connection between the criminal-legal and criminal-procedural concepts of the victim, although there is no identity. The criminal law concept of the victim may be broader or narrower than the procedural one, it may or may not coincide with it, which is why these concepts should be clearly delineated.
However, victimization can also have its dark side, which may be seen as getting more victims to report being victimized. A person can assess as a crime something that is not such from the viewpoint of the law. This factor may significantly increase the reporting of victimization. Victimization data is not the same as reported crime data. Some criminal incidents are more difficult to identify due to the fact that the interviewee must believe that he or she is the victim of a crime (Biderman & Reiss, 2017). For example, in the case of fraud aimed at deceiving people, the victim may think that he or she has become a victim, but it can be a wrong statement. Moreover, many surveyed people may not appear in official police statistics because crimes may not be reported or recorded by the police. Therefore, the victimization estimates generated from the surveys are likely to be higher than those obtained from police records.
References
Biderman, A. D., & Reiss, A. J. (2017). On exploring the “dark figure” of crime. In Quantitative Methods in Criminology (pp. 201-215). Routledge.
Jubaer, S. M. O. F., Hoque, L., Rahman, F., Moumi, A., & Deb, B. (2021). Victimless crime and victimology under different national legal system: A global approach. European Scholar Journal, 2(5), 6-16. Web.
Walklate, S. (2019). Researching victims of crime: Critical victimology. In Realist Criminology (pp. 285-302). University of Toronto Press.