Victimology: Positivist and Critical Approaches

Last Updated on September 26, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Victimology is the study of who becomes a victim of crime, why, and whose victimisation gets officially recognised. Two approaches are on the AQA specification:

1. Positivist victimology looks for the characteristics and situations that make victimisation more likely, including what victims themselves may have contributed.
2. Critical victimology asks who has the power to be labelled a victim at all, and argues the state routinely withholds that label from the powerless.

Critical victimology is sometimes called radical victimology. They are the same approach.

Victimology sits within the crime and deviance module, AQA Paper 3 (7192/3), and it is one of the least revised topics on the paper — which makes it one of the easiest places to stand out.

1. Where the data comes from, and why that is examinable

The main source is the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), run by the Office for National Statistics. It is a face-to-face survey of people aged 16 and over living in private households, asking what crimes they experienced in the previous twelve months and whether they reported them. A separate survey covers 10 to 15 year olds.

Three things about it have changed since most textbooks were written, and all three earn marks.

The response rate collapsed and has only partly recovered

Year ending March	Response rate
2020 (pre-pandemic)	64%
2023	42%
2025	46%
2026 (preliminary)	48%

A survey that more than half the sample declines raises an obvious question about non-response bias: are the people who refuse different, in ways that matter for crime, from the people who take part?

HOWEVER, the ONS’s own quality review concluded the fall has had little effect on representativeness, and that post-survey weighting brings the achieved sample close to the 2021 Census profile. Say both halves of that. The concern is real; the people running the survey have investigated it and published the answer.

The sample is smaller than the textbooks say

The familiar “approximately 35,000 adults” comes from the pre-pandemic design. 31,183 people were interviewed in the year to March 2023. Do not quote 35,000 as current.

It stopped being face-to-face for two years

Fieldwork was suspended in March 2020 and replaced by the Telephone-operated CSEW until March 2022. There is no comparable CSEW data for 2020/21 or 2021/22 at all. Any source quoting TCSEW figures — and several still do — is describing a survey that no longer exists.

Who the survey misses

• Children under 16 in the main survey.
• People not living in private households — the homeless, and people in care homes, prisons, hostels and student halls. This matters more than it sounds: in England, 173,280 safeguarding enquiries were raised in a single year for adults who may be at risk of abuse or neglect, a third of them (55,220) concerning adults in a care or nursing home. None of that appears in the CSEW, which means the survey cannot be used as evidence that abuse of older people in institutions is either common or rare. It does not look.
• Crimes with no individual victim who knows they were victimised — most corporate crime, environmental crime, and fraud against organisations. State crime is not covered either.
• Crimes people will not disclose to an interviewer. Domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking are asked in a self-completion module for exactly this reason.

This section is reusable in research methods questions and in Methods in Context. The response rate is the single most portable statistic in the whole module.

2. Patterns of victimisation

CSEW, year ending March 2025, unless stated.

Overall

10.8% of people aged 16 and over were the victim of a personal crime on one or more occasions — a significant rise from 9.7%, almost entirely fraud.

That last point matters more than it looks. Fraud is far more evenly spread across social groups than violence is, so headline victimisation figures increasingly average together two different things, and any group difference in the headline number will look smaller than the difference for violence alone.

Age

Younger people are consistently more at risk. People aged 55 and over have significantly lower odds of victimisation than 16 to 24 year olds.

HOWEVER — and this is the interesting part — the ONS found this gap narrows once you adjust for time spent outside the home and visits to pubs and bars. Age itself is not doing all the work. Exposure is.

That is a lifestyle explanation of victimisation, produced by the national statistical institute, in recent UK data. It is exactly what positivist victimology claims, tested properly, and almost no candidate has it.

Social class and deprivation

People in the most deprived areas are more likely to be victims of violence than those in the least deprived. Pooled Crime Survey data for 2011–2017 found adults from the 10% most deprived areas were almost twice as likely to be victims of violent crime as adults from the 10% most affluent.

On all crime including fraud, class differences are modest. On violent crime, deprivation is one of the clearer predictors. That distinction is the empirical foundation of left realism: the working class are more likely to be offenders and more likely to be victims.

Disability and household type

Disabled people and people in single-parent households have roughly 1.5 times the odds of being victims of headline crime, after adjusting for other factors. The “after adjusting” matters — it means the effect is not just a by-product of age or income.

Sex

For CSEW headline crime there is no significant difference between men and women.

Do not write “women are more likely to be victims of crime”, and do not write that men are. Both are wrong as stated. The rates are similar and the composition is completely different:

• Men are more likely to be victims of stranger violence and of homicide.
• Women are more likely to be victims of sexual assault, stalking, harassment and domestic abuse.

Notice what that means methodologically: the offences women disproportionately experience are precisely the ones a survey handles worst, which is why they sit in the self-completion module.

Homicide, year ending March 2025: 522 victims, 70% male (366) and 30% female (155). The rate was 8.6 per million, the lowest since 1977.

Sexual offences, year ending March 2025: 3.0% of women and 0.7% of men aged 16+ were victims of sexual assault including attempts. Only 14.7% reported the most recent assault to the police.

Ethnicity

The blanket claim that ethnic minorities are more likely to be victims is not supported. The picture splits:

• 12.1% of Black people aged 16+ were victims of a personal crime — a significant rise from 9.2%.
• 10.9% of White people.
• 8.8% of Asian people — significantly lower than the White figure.

The starkest disparity is homicide: in the three years to March 2024, the victimisation rate was 39.8 per million for Black victims against 8.5 for White victims, over four times higher. Around a third of Black homicide victims were under 21, against 14% of White victims.

Repeat victimisation

Victimisation is concentrated, not randomly distributed. In the year to March 2018, 26% of victims of violence were victimised more than once, and repeat victims accounted for 57% of all violent incidents.

This is the most analytically useful fact in the topic, because it rules out bad luck. If risk were random, repeats would be rare. They are not — so both perspectives have something they must explain.

3. Positivist victimology

Miers (1989) defines positivist victimology by three features:

1. It identifies the factors that produce the patterns set out above.
2. It focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence.
3. It examines how victims may have contributed to their own victimisation.

That third feature is what makes the approach distinctive, and also what gets it into trouble.

Victim proneness

Von Hentig (1948) identified thirteen characteristics of the “victim prone”, including being female, elderly or — in the language of the time — “mentally subnormal”. The implication is that victims in some sense invite victimisation by who they are.

It is worth pausing on that phrasing rather than repeating it flat. Von Hentig was writing in 1948, and his categories tell us as much about the assumptions of the 1940s as they do about victims. A student who notices that has already started evaluating.

Victim precipitation

Wolfgang (1958) studied 588 homicides in Philadelphia and found 26% involved victim precipitation — the victim triggered the sequence of events, most often by being the first to use violence.

Use it, but date it and locate it: one American city, in the 1950s, looking only at homicide.

The modern version: lifestyle and exposure

Positivist victimology has not stood still since 1958. Its defensible modern form is lifestyle and routine activity theory: risk depends on exposure — where you go, when, with whom, and how well guarded you are. It drops the moral judgement about victim proneness and keeps the empirical claim about situations.

The ONS finding above — that the age gap shrinks once pub visits and time outside the home are controlled for — is that argument, in current data.

4. Critical victimology

Critical victimology (also called radical victimology) is rooted in conflict theories, principally Marxism and feminism. It makes two distinct claims, and most students give only the first.

Claim one: structural factors determine who is victimised

Poverty, patriarchy and racism distribute victimisation unequally before any individual makes any choice.

Living in a poor area means living closer to offenders, in worse-secured housing, with less money to buy safety. Patriarchal structures sustain the domestic and sexual violence women disproportionately experience. Minority ethnic groups face racially motivated crime and over-policing at the same time. Globally, people in poorer countries are the victims of harms done by Western corporations and states, and are least likely of anyone to see justice.

Claim two: the state can grant or withhold the label of victim

This is the distinctive contribution and where the marks are.

Tombs and Whyte (2007) showed that employers’ breaches of health and safety law causing workers’ deaths are routinely explained away as industrial accidents. And an accident has no offender — so it has no victim either. They call this an ideological function: by concealing the extent of victimisation and its causes, de-labelling hides the crimes of the powerful and denies their victims redress.

The general form is the hierarchy of victimisation: the powerless are most likely to be victimised and least likely to have it acknowledged.

Feminist criminologists make the same case about sexual violence, and the reporting data supports it directly. If only 14.7% of the most recent sexual assaults are reported to the police, the overwhelming majority of victims never acquire official victim status — not because nothing happened to them, but because the process that confers the label never begins.

Zemiology

Critical victimologists therefore argue for zemiology — the study of harm rather than the study of crime. Studying only what the state has defined as criminal means adopting the state’s own view of who counts. Studying harm brings workplace deaths, state violence, environmental damage and the effects of poverty into view.

5. A worked example: displacing the poor from London

A case that shows the hierarchy of victimisation without anyone committing a crime.

London councils, unable to meet housing need in the capital, have moved homeless families out of London — usually to Kent and Essex, sometimes much further. At the least this removes families from their social networks and disrupts children’s schooling. In some cases the housing itself creates risk.

Terminus House in Harlow, Essex, is the standing example: a 1960s fourteen-storey former office block converted into flats under permitted development rights and run by a private company from April 2018. London councils placed hundreds of newly homeless Londoners there. The block also housed a number of recently released ex-offenders. According to local press reporting of police figures, crime within Terminus House rose by 45% in the first ten months after people moved in, and by 20% within a 500-metre radius. [These figures come from local news reporting rather than a primary source — attribute them as such, or replace with a Home Office or police-force figure before publishing.]

No crime has been committed by the councils. The decision was lawful, taken under financial pressure, and nobody will be prosecuted. But a group of people with very little power became significantly more likely to be victims of crime as a direct result of a policy decision.

That is critical victimology’s argument in miniature: the harm is real, the victims are identifiable, and the label never attaches.

Grenfell Tower (2017) is the larger version of the same case — seventy-two deaths in social housing occupied largely by poorer and minority ethnic residents, where the question of criminal responsibility took years and was contested throughout.

A second worked example: Hillsborough

On 15 April 1989, ninety-seven Liverpool supporters died in a crush at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, at an FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest.

What makes Hillsborough the clearest case in British criminal justice for critical victimology is not the disaster. It is what happened to the victims afterwards.

They were blamed for their own deaths. Within days, senior police officers briefed that drunken, ticketless fans had forced a gate and caused the crush. Four days after the disaster, a national newspaper ran the claim on its front page under the headline “THE TRUTH”. The paper is still boycotted across Merseyside.

The official record was altered. The Hillsborough Independent Panel, reporting in 2012, found that 164 police statements had been significantly amended, and that 116 of those amendments removed or altered comments unfavourable to South Yorkshire Police.

The first inquests returned accidental death in 1991. Those verdicts were quashed in 2012.

It took twenty-seven years to reverse. In April 2016, new inquests found that the victims had been unlawfully killed, and that no behaviour by supporters contributed to the disaster.

Almost nobody was held criminally responsible. The match commander was acquitted at a retrial in 2019. In 2021, a judge ruled there was no case to answer against two former police officers and a solicitor accused of altering the statements, on the grounds that inquests are not proceedings that can be perverted.

Set that against the definition of critical victimology and every element is present. The victims were ordinary working-class people. The institution responsible was an arm of the state. The state controlled the investigation, the inquest and the flow of information. And for a generation, the official position was that the victims had done it to themselves.

This is the hierarchy of victimisation in its sharpest form. The powerless were victimised, then denied the label, and the denial itself was organised by the people responsible.

The most recent development is worth knowing, because it shows the argument having an effect. The Public Office (Accountability) Bill — universally called the Hillsborough Law — would place a statutory duty of candour on public authorities and officials, backed by criminal sanction, and give bereaved families legal representation at inquests on a par with the institutions they face. Introduced in September 2025, it passed the Commons in July 2026 after a six-month deadlock over whether the duty should apply to the intelligence services, and is now before the Lords. It responds to Hillsborough, Grenfell, Infected Blood and Windrush together.

Critical victimologists would make two points about it. That it took thirty-seven years is the argument. That it is happening at all is the qualification — the state can be forced to recognise victims it spent decades refusing to recognise, which suggests the hierarchy is contestable rather than fixed.

6. Evaluation

Positivist victimology

✓ Strengths	✗ Limitations
Identifies real, measurable patterns — age, deprivation, disability, household type, lifestyle	Slides very easily into victim blaming. “Victim precipitation” applied to sexual violence is the “she was asking for it” argument in academic language
The lifestyle version is supported by current ONS evidence on exposure and time outside the home	Von Hentig’s thirteen characteristics are of their period and would not survive ethical review today
Directly useful for crime prevention — if exposure predicts risk, exposure can be reduced. This is the basis of situational crime prevention	Confined to conventional interpersonal crime. Nothing to say about corporate, state or green crime, where victims are far more numerous
Takes ordinary victims of ordinary crime seriously, which realists say critical approaches do not	Explains which individuals are at risk without asking why the risk is distributed that way
Explains repeat victimisation well: stable characteristics and routines produce repeated risk	Wolfgang’s 26% is one American city in the 1950s, generalised far beyond what a single study supports

Critical victimology

✓ Strengths	✗ Limitations
Explains the distribution of risk, not just who happens to be in it	Gives no weight to what victims can do to reduce risk — securing a home, avoiding certain situations
Tombs and Whyte on health and safety deaths is strong, specific evidence that de-labelling happens	Realists argue criticising the state is not a strategy for reducing burglary and street violence, which fall hardest on the poor
Accounts for victims the CSEW structurally cannot see: the homeless, people in institutions, victims of corporate and state crime	Zemiology’s definition of harm is very wide and hard to operationalise. If every harm is in scope, what is excluded, and who decides?
Supported by reporting data — 14.7% reporting for sexual assault shows most victimisation never reaches official status	Difficult to test empirically: the central claim concerns victimisation that by definition is not recorded
Explains why some victims are treated as “deserving” and others are not, which positivism cannot	Can be as deterministic as the theories it criticises, treating victims purely as products of structure

7. Exam pointers

• Use each perspective to evaluate the other. That single move covers most of the AO3 available here.
• The CSEW response rate is usable in this topic, in official statistics questions, and in Methods in Context. 64% before the pandemic, 48% now.
• On gender, say what the data says: no significant difference in headline crime, sharp differences by offence type. The blanket claims in most textbooks are wrong.
• Repeat victimisation is the strongest analytical point because it rules out randomness, and both perspectives then have to account for it.
• Link outward. Critical victimology connects to state and green crime, to Marxism and to feminist criminology; positivist victimology connects to situational crime prevention.

For a 10-mark answer applying this to social class, see analyse two reasons the lower classes may be more likely to be victims of crime.

Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle

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Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, Paper 3 (7192/3).

For what victimisation does to people, including secondary victimisation, see what are the impacts of crime on victims?

For what crime costs the country, see the economic and social costs of crime.

For the exam application, see this 10-mark question on victimisation and social class.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources

Office for National Statistics, Crime in England and Wales, year ending March 2025; Crime in England and Wales: victim characteristics, year ending March 2023; Homicide in England and Wales, year ending March 2025; Sexual offences in England and Wales, year ending March 2025; The nature of violent crime in England and Wales, year ending March 2018; Improving crime statistics for England and Wales, July 2026.

Ministry of Justice, Statistics on Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System 2024, published 27 November 2025.

Miers, D. (1989); Von Hentig, H. (1948) The Criminal and His Victim; Wolfgang, M. (1958) Patterns in Criminal Homicide; Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (2007).