Thursday, October 21, 2010

Victimology

It is clear by this stage of our course that the media play a sizeable part in developing society’s perceptions of the criminal justice system, and all it entails. Thus, it is of no surprise that the media also contribute to the way we perceive victims; this is why it is essential to examine the media representation of victims.

The term ‘victimology’ was coined by Frederick Wertham, who thought there should be a ‘science of victimology’ (Wertham, 1949). Positivist victimology has become widely known, and has been described as, ‘the identification of factors which contribute to a non random pattern of victimization, a focus on interpersonal crimes of violence, and a concern to identify victims who may have contributed to their own victimization’ (Miers, 1989, as cited in Marsh & Melville, 2009). Similarly, Mendelsohn (1963) argued that some victims were culpable. Both of these notions overemphasized blame and vulnerability, and therefore it is not difficult to understand why they have succumbed to a great deal of debate and criticism.

Marsh and Melville (2009) interestingly suggest that the media have the power to socially construct the idea of the victim. In researching this proposal, I came across a term that has gained increasing controversy. ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’ (or MWWS) is a vernacular term created to describe the disproportionately greater extent of coverage by the media on young, attractive, white, middle-class women (usually in missing persons cases). Focusing on ‘the damsel in distress’, this term seems to have surfaced during the Laci Peterson case in 2002. At the same time Laci went missing and was dominating media coverage, a pregnant African-American woman named LaToyia Figueroa disappeared at the same time and attracted no national attention.

In 2010 this terminology has been attributed to more cases. Last month, Valerie Hamilton was murdered in Niagara Falls, NY. The media reports on her described her as pretty 23-year-old student of community college and the daughter of Concord Police chief. This raised controversy, some of which can be seen on the video on this page:

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/theclog/2010/09/21/missing-white-woman-syndrome/

As this term is relatively new it will be interesting to track its development in the field of criminology as academic literature begins to appear on it. The media could not possible report on every single individual missing persons case; the question is, how do they determine which cases to report on?

References

Marsh, I & Melville, G 2009, Crime, Justice and the Media’, Routledge, New York.

Mendelsohn, B 1963, ‘The origin and doctrine of victimology’ in Rock, P (ed), Victimology, Dartmouth, Aldershot.

Wertham, F 1949, The Show of Violence, Doubleday, New York.

No comments:

Post a Comment