THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO VICTIMISATION

Theoretical Approaches to Victimisation

Theoretical Approaches to Victimisation

Introduction

It has become significant for the crime investigator to know the crime theories, as it will help to solve the crime case and find the criminal. The paper has identified three important theories that will help to comprehend the crime and criminals.

Crime Pattern Theory

Crime pattern theory focuses on crime as a complex event that requires many different elements for its occurrence. This places it in sharp contrast with traditional criminology, which is focused on the development of criminal propensity in offenders. Crime pattern theory observes that neither motivated offenders nor opportunities for crime are either randomly or uniformly distributed in space and time. Probably the strongest physical characteristic of crime is that the sites where crimes occur are concentrated. Regardless of whether the crime under consideration is murder or rape, assault or theft, burglary or vandalism, a limited number of sites, times, and situations constitute the space-time loci for the vast majority of offenses. Crime pattern theory places special emphasis on the geography and temporal patterning of crime in order to understand how the physical and social environment structure criminal events (McCord, 1995, pp. 418).

Offenders and Victims Make Normal Use of Time and Space

While much traditional criminology searches for some pathology that would explain criminal behavior, crime pattern theory assumes that people who commit crimes have normal perceptions and make normal use of time and space. Offenders and victim's exhibit movement patterns tied to personal activity and awareness spaces that are similar to those of everyone else. The likely location for a crime is near this normal activity and awareness space (Reckless, 1961b, pp. 42-46).

Routine Activities

Daily life plays out through a series of routine activities following common activity clocks such as the morning commute to work or the rhythm of the school year. Routine activities are anchored to persistent personal activity nodes and travel paths. Routines vary from weekday to weekend and from normal days to holidays, but are generally structured around home, work, school, shopping, entertainment, and recreation points. People develop routine pathways between their anchor points (Dodder, 1980, pp. 5).

Containment Theory

Containment theory is accepted as one of the initially presented control theories for the reason that it is focused on what control an individual from indulging in crime or relatively, what “contain” people (contain or containment fundamentally used in place of the term control). As pointed by Richard Dodder and Janet Long, containment theory recognized and become popular in the 1950s and 1960s and has become a staple in the discipline of criminological theory. While, in accordance with other scholars, the theory has gone out of study in past some years, but containment theory has kept its foundational place in criminological theory. Containment Theory asked the query, “In a deviant's society, how and why do individual ignore deviances?” One of the famous criminology theories in the 1950 and 1960 come by Walter Reckless the Containment Theory. It is the theory that explains that all individuals of society are subjected ...