Crime Victimization: A Comprehensive Overview

Crime Victimization: A Comprehensive Overview provides students with a broad picture of the work done to draw attention to crime victims and the overall effects of victimization, including victim needs for recovery from crime. This text explores victimization at the street crime level, but also delves into less commonly discussed types of victimization including state and corporate crime, hate crime, cybercrime, environmental crime, and workplace violence.

This text addresses the full spectrum of victimization from "victimless" crimes to repeat victimizations and provides students with an understanding of why victimization occurs, how victims deal with the aftereffects, what services are available to victims, and how professionals both within and outside of the criminal justice field can both help and hinder victims' journeys toward recovery.

The evolution of the victims' rights movement, along with the development of national victim service organizations, important pieces of legislation, and international victimological associations, is presented to provide students with an idea of the work that practitioners, activists, and researchers have done to both improve services to and enhance our understanding of crime victims overall.

Crime Victimization provides a global understanding of victimization to highlight the impact of the crime phenomenon on the overall human condition. Additionally, students are introduced to burgeoning developments in the victim services field along with profiles of victimologists, victims' rights activists, and victim service providers to help them identify the impact they can have on the field of victimology and on individual crime victims in their chosen fields.

In this new edition, students will find updated crime victimization statistics throughout the textbook and added information on areas not previously addressed, such as the National Victim Service Provider Survey, trauma-informed care, and updated information about victimization by the criminal justice system.

The impact of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and its influence on how crime victimization was experienced, is included throughout the text. Finally, the authors expanded upon the topics of organizational stress for persons who work with victims and the need for cultural competency in victim services and gender-specific victim services, including the significant work that needs to be done on the victimization of male crime victims.

Elizabeth Quinn Wright is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Administration at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Sara Brightman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.