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Chapter 5: The Ongoing Controversy over Shared Responsibility
from Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, 10e by Andrew Karmen
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Upon completing this chapter, the student should be able to:
L01. Discuss the controversy surrounding the concept of shared responsibility.
L03. Distinguish between victim facilitation, precipitation, and provocation.
L05. Discuss victim facilitation, victim blaming, and victim defending in relation to vehicle theft.
L07. Discuss victim facilitation, victim blaming, and victim defending in relation to murder.
L08 Discuss victim facilitation, victim blaming, and victim defending in relation to robbery.
L10. Describe the impact of beliefs about shared responsibility on the operations of the criminal justice
system.
L11. Explain the difference between crime prevention and victimization prevention.
LESSON PLAN
Correlated to PowerPoints
I. How Some Victims Contribute to the Crime Problem [Learning Objective 1]
A. Victimologists objectively study shared responsibility for crimes.
2. Victimologists study the initiatives and responses, actions and reactions, and
motives and intentions of both parties.
3. Framework leads to the proposition that injured parties did not do all they could
to limit their exposure to danger or threat.
II. Repeat and Chronic Victims: Learning from Past Mistakes?
A. Researchers look for responsibility by focusing on repeat or chronic victims.
1. Past injury is the best predictor of future harm.
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3. NCVS data show that “series incidents” account for about 2 percent of
victimizations.
4. Victimologists interview injured parties to determine their victim careers and to
5. Crime analysts determined two reasons for repeat victimization.
a. A boost explanation
i. Career criminals gain important information on people and
places based on experience.
ii. Example: car thieves open a specific make and model without a
key.
b. A flag explanation
i. Vulnerable or attractive targets might suffer via various
criminals.
ii. Example: apartments with sliding-glass doors.
What If Scenario
You assist the local police department’s crime analyst. You notice that there is an increasing amount of crime in a small,
wooded area near a shopping mall. What actions do you take? What is the likelihood of repeat or chronic victims in this area?
III. The Entire Spectrum of Possibilities: Recognizing Complete Innocence and Full Responsibility
A. Typologies illustrate the degree of shared responsibility.
1. Categories include ideal, culturally legitimate and appropriate, deserving,
consenting, and recidivist.
2. To be complete, the typology spectrum must add two extreme positions:
a. Complete innocence
i. Wrong place, wrong time
b. Full responsibility
i. Fake victims
Media Tool
Leap of Faith
-A full-length movie about a fictional faith healer at a Kansas revival
Boiler Room
-A full-length movie about a pump-and-dump brokerage firm in Long Island
-Discussion: Who were the victims in the movie? How would you categorize them (complete innocence, deserving,
consenting, etc.)? How did the offenders obtain information about their intended victims? How did the movie’s ending affect
your opinion of the offenders?
IV. Who or What Is to Blame for Specific Incidents? [Learning Objective 2]
A. What Is Victim Blaming?
2. Victimologists may unavoidably blame the victim—hindsight is 20–20 when
reconstructing a crime.
3. Victim blaming follows a three-stage thought process:
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© 2020 Cengage. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
c. Victims are warned to change thoughts and actions to avoid future
trouble.
4. Victim blaming is a widely held view for several reasons:
a. It provides specific answers to questions like “Why him and not me?”
5. Offenders often blame victims to justify their crimes.
a. Defense attorneys may continue with these theories in court.
B. What Is Victim Defending?
2. Criticisms of victim blaming include the following:
a. Overstatement of the extent to which careless habits and other foolhardy
3. Victim defending is unclear about what it supports, but two tendencies concern
who or what is at fault:
a. Offender blaming
b. System blaming
See Assignment 1
C. What Is System Blaming?
1. Focus of attention is on the social–economic–political theories in criminology
2. System blaming may result in excusing the offender from accountability.
What If Scenario
Imagine that your laptop was recently stolen. In what ways might you blame yourself for negligence? How would you defend
yourself? How might you blame the system?
V. Mistakes Individuals Make: Victim Facilitation [Learning Objective 3]
A. Shared responsibility includes victim facilitation, precipitation, and provocation.
1. Each term describes the specific, identifiable, and undesirable actions taken by
individuals immediately before they were harmed.
3. Facilitation is the least serious charge because victims’ actions are careless and
inadvertent.
See Assignment 2
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B. How Many Identity Thefts Were Victim Facilitated? [Learning Objective 6]
1. The nature of the problem and how many people experience its aggravations
a. Identity theft begins with the illegal appropriation of someone’s
personal identifiers and moves to attempts to misuse them to steal from
2. Is the problem growing or subsiding?
a. Estimates vary due to differing definitions of ID theft and collection
methods.
b. Data are sourced from the NCVS, the FTC, and an annual survey by an
insurance company (selling coverage).
c. NCVS data show that ID theft rates have leveled off at 7 percent (176
3. Losses and suffering
a. Burden of proving innocence falls to the victim.
b. People discover the crime via a declined credit card (5 percent), a phone
call from a credit card’s fraud division (45 percent), fraudulent charges
on a bill (18 percent), etc.
c. ID theft poses a special threat for those who need security clearance for
work.
d. Businesses sustain most of the financial losses, but individuals spend a
great deal of money repairing their credit worthiness.
e. Estimates differentiate between direct losses (cash, goods, and services)
and indirect losses (fees for bounced checks, attorneys, etc.).
i. Average loss in 2014 was $1,350.
ii. Credit card companies reimburse victims, so actual out-of-pocket
f. Table 5.1 shows the range of possible swindles and the percentage of all
complaints for each.
g. ID theft results in other financial and legal problems—damaged credit
ratings, unpaid bills, emotional crises, etc.
4. Who faces the greatest risk?
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ii. Some victims do not know the FTC hears complaints.
5. Blaming victims whose identities were stolen
a. Victim blamers assume carelessness is the most frequent cause—opening
attachments, failing to shred documents.
b. Victim defenders assert there are many opportunities for theft.
6. Victim-defending arguments
a. Even cyber-streetwise people experience ID theft.
b. Expert recommendations for protection are impractical or unreasonable.
c. Estimating the proportion of identity thefts that were victim-facilitated:
i. Most victims do not know why the theft happened.
ii. The thief is usually a complete stranger, but “friendly fraud” is
rising.
See Assignment 3
Media Tool
“Why Everyone’s to Blame for Identity Theft” (https://abcnews.go.com/Business/everyones-blame-identity-
theft/story?id=28945398)
-An editorial opinion citing why victims should be held accountable for identity theft
Class Discussion/Activity
With your classmates or in small groups, develop a profile of someone who might fall victim to phishing or pharming. What
led you to those conclusions? How do they compare with the profile presented in the chapter? What precautions might you
recommend for this group?
C. How Many Burglaries Were Victim-Facilitated? [Learning Objective 4]
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1. Data appear in the NCVS and the UCR for forcible entries, attempted forcible
entries, and unlawful entries without force. Only the NCVS tracks counts by
household or commercial category.
2. Residential burglaries are facilitated if the homeowner left a door unlocked or a
3. Demographics of those more likely to facilitate a burglary include the following:
a. Younger people over senior citizens
4. Security systems may not be the reason for the drop in burglaries, since other
violent crimes have fallen as well. It may be changes in American society.
5. Box 5.4 shows burglary prevention advice from security experts.
7. System blamers assert that the black market for stolen goods needs to be
eradicated.
D. How Many Vehicle Thefts Were Victim-Facilitated? [Learning Objective 5]
1. Negligent drivers leave vehicles unlocked (20 percent) or running (33 percent).
2.The first law regarding car theft was passed in 1919.
3. Thieves steal cars for several reasons including the following:
4. Box 5.5 offers expert tips about vehicle theft prevention.
5. Negligence leading to crimes of opportunity is a significant problem.
6. Victim defenders argue that professional thieves are a bigger threat than joyriders
(via crimes of opportunity).
a. Only one out of every eight thefts is now key-facilitated.
See Assignment 4
Class Discussion/Activity
Hold a classroom debate about whether or not home and automobile security systems are necessary in today’s world. How
effective are they as deterrents? Are people paying too high a price for emotional security?
VI. Victim Precipitation and Provocation [Learning Objective 3]
A. The terms are not interchangeable.
1. Provocation embodies a stronger condemnation than precipitation.
2. Early research shows that victim-precipitated murders mostly involve male
3. Charges of subintentional death often are leveled at repeat victims.
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© 2020 Cengage. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
5. Deaths classified as justifiable homicide have no provocative victims, but dead
offenders.
6. Victims of police brutality often are condemned for provoking officers in use of
excessive force.
What If Scenario
You are a patrol officer and answer a call regarding a man brandishing a gun. He advances on you and ignores your warnings
to stop. You shoot and kill him, an act the public refers to as “suicide by cop.” Was this a matter of police brutality or a
matter of victim facilitation, precipitation, or provocation? Defend your reasoning.
B. How Many Violent Crimes Were Precipitated or Provoked? [Learning Objectives 7 and 8]
1. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (NCCPV),
created in the 1960s, studied murders, aggravated assaults, rapes, and robberies
2. Alcohol consumption is indicated more consistently than drugs in fueling
3. Violence may begin as a slur or gesture and evolve into an escalating character
contest.
4. A typical robbery (when transacted through instrumental coercion) proceeds
through five stages:
5. Box 5.6 details experts’ suggestions for preventing and/or surviving robberies.
VII. Transcending Victim Blaming and Victim Defending: System Blaming
A. Nearly everyone blames certain victims and defends others.
1. Strengths of victim blaming and victim defending lie in the willingness to
scrutinize criminal acts.
2. Drawbacks of both perspectives lie in the tendency to be microscopic rather than
macroscopic.
a. They inadvertently let the system off the hook.
B. Blaming the System for Violent and Property Crimes
2. A consumer-oriented society sets the stage for robberies.
3. Fencing creates a market for burglary items (including cars).
C. Blaming the System for the Problem of Identity Theft
2. Much personal information is readily available via the Internet.
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3. Current laws are inadequate and companies are not held accountable for data
breeches.
VIII. The Importance of Determining Responsibility in the Criminal Justice Process
[Learning Objective 10]
A. Fixing responsibility for a crime requires judgments about the degree of responsibility.
B. Theorizing about Risk Factors: Figuring Out Why Certain Groups Suffer More Often
than Others
1. Wrong place, wrong time
2. Theoretical explanations
a. Start as hypotheses that answer questions beginning with “why”
b. Make an empirical generalization
c. Ask, “What accounts for this?”
See Assignment 5
C. Applying Deterrence Theory to Victims
2. Offenders’ suffering may not deter the general public from crime.
D. Why Various Groups Experience Differential Risks: Routine Activities and Specific
1. Victimologists do not emphasize one vulnerability factor but create elaborate
theories using factors as building blocks.
2. Tourists often are preyed upon because of a confluence of factors.
3. Routine activities theory stresses the interaction of three key variables:
a. Existence of motivated criminals
b. Availability of suitable targets
c. Presence or absence of capable guardians (motion detectors, bright
lights, safes, etc.)
i. Daily activities govern the social ecology of victimization.
ii. One’s lifestyle can account for differences in susceptibility to
violence and theft.
See Assignment 6
Media Tool
“Tourist Crime Victims Find Little Hope for Justice in Mexico (https://www.pressreader.com/usa/usa-today-us–
edition/20170817/281479276526177)
-A USA Today article about blackout victims in Mexican resorts
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-Discussion: Examine the vulnerability of these tourists using the building blocks from the chapter: attractiveness,
situational factors, proximity, and vulnerability. Discuss the cases in terms of victim blaming, victim defending, and system
blaming.
Class Discussion/Activity
Alcohol consumption is known to affect a person’s ability to make sound judgments. Does it increase a person’s exposure to
high-risk circumstances? Does it increase victim provocative behaviors? What kind of precautionary behaviors might be
needed to offset any inherent risks?
E. Some Victims Were Criminals: The Equivalent Group Explanation
1. The equivalent group explanation argues that offenders select their victims from
their own circles of adversaries, acquaintances, and former friends.
3. A blame-the-victim bias emerges implying that their suffering is less deserving
of compassion, support, and respectful treatment.
What If Scenario
You are a homicide detective investigating a series of murders that appear to be motivated by a turf war between
organized crime families. How does this affect your job? How does this affect media attention to the murders in the
community? What is the most likely community reaction to the crimes?
Class Discussion/Activity
With your classmates, hold a debate about the subculture of violence theory. Address the issues of victim blaming
bias, the justice offenders receive, and community opinion.
F. What’s the Difference between Crime Prevention and Victimization Prevention?
[Learning Objective 11]
1. Crime prevention relies on proactive strategies that discourage the development
of illegal activities.
3. Most tips, warnings, and advice presented in this chapter can be categorized as
4. There are many new risk-reduction activities including the following:
a. Avoidance strategies
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i. Valve theory of crime shifts asserts that offenses will not
decline when targets are hardened because criminals will look
for new targets.
e. Crime resistance
i. Individual or collective
G. Reducing Risks: How Safe Is Safe Enough?
1. When social scientists estimate risks, they are predicting how many people will
experience unwanted incidents.
3. It is reasonable for some people to decide that the odds pose an acceptable risk.
5. Victimologists need to conduct research studies to determine whether prevention
tips and recommendations (provided in chapter boxes) really work as touted and
as intended.
See Assignment 7
H. Ambivalence about Risk Taking
1. American culture both embraces and abhors risk taking.
2. These attitudes are mirrored in contradictory responses to victimization.
LECTURE NOTES
The first few criminologists drawn to the study of victims were enthusiastic about the concept of shared
responsibility as a possible cause of crime. By raising previously overlooked questions about victim
proneness, individual vulnerability, and personal accountability for one’s misfortunes, they believed they
were developing a more complete explanation about why laws are broken and people get hurt. They also
touched off a controversy within victimology.
Throughout this chapter, the arguments from both sides of the debate over shared responsibility are
presented. First, the concepts of facilitation, precipitation, and provocation are introduced. Then,
evidence from research into the issue of shared responsibility is examined. The chapter defines and
discusses victim blaming and victim defending and illustrates these concepts by looking at the role of the
victim in the crimes of auto theft and identity theft.
Until victimology emerged, mainstream criminology had consistently ignored the role injured parties
might play in setting the stage for lawless behavior. Victimologists have pledged to correct this imbalance
by objectively examining all kinds of situations to see whether the people who were harmed might have
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themselves in confrontational and illegal situations, they are in part to blame for their own troubles. What
about the vast majority of innocent victims who lived law-abiding lives before they were targeted?
Instead of minimizing the risks they faced, certain individuals maximized them by making bad choices.
Following this line of thought, many victims can be faulted, to some degree. The circumstances under
which they were harmed were partly of their own making. The unfortunate events that befell them could
have been avoided—at least in hindsight.
Researchers looking for clear-cut cases of shared responsibility often focus on individuals who have
suffered a series of thefts or attacks. Offenders seem to set their sights on certain individuals and
households more than once during a given time period. Suffering three or more times during a relatively
short time span qualifies a person for the dubious distinction of being a “chronic victim.” Such repetitive
crimes are most likely to break out in very localized high-crime areas, dubbed hot spots. Just as criminals
have careers in which they offend in various ways over the years, those on the receiving end might also be
The question of the victim’s role in cases of street crime was systematically explored for the first time in
the late 1960s by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.
Sometimes victims cause crime in the sense they set up the opportunity for the crime to be committed.
These notions of victim facilitation, precipitation, and provocation have been derived from the broader
theme of shared responsibility to describe the specific, identifiable, blameworthy actions taken by certain
individuals immediately before they were harmed.
Victim facilitation refers to actions taken by the victim that unwittingly assist the offender. An example
would be a person who leaves his keys in the car and the window down while he goes inside a store. If his
car is stolen, he can be said to have facilitated the crime by making it easy for the thief to enter and start
the car.
Victim precipitation refers to actions taken by the victim to contribute to the crime. An example would be
a man who is carrying on an affair with the wife of another man. While he is not actively seeking a
confrontation, his actions (the affair) may be the cause of violence directed toward him if his partner’s
husband discovers the affair.
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first, “offender blaming,” resists any attempt to shift the burden of full responsibility off the lawbreakers’
backs and onto the victim’s shoulders. The second tendency, known as “system blaming,” removes
responsibility for the crime from both the offender and victim and assigns it to their social environments.
For example, citing one’s poor economic status as the reason why someone perpetrated a theft would be
A persistent problem is that this crime often goes unreported, uninvestigated, and/or unsolved. Many law
enforcement agencies lack necessary training and the departments lack the needed resources to provide an
adequate response. Multijurisdictional complications undercut an agency’s commitment to follow through
on a complaint. This potentially serious type of larceny can damage a person’s finances, reputation, and
credit history, as well as cause great emotional distress that can trigger relationship problems. A targeted
Victim blamers assume carelessness is the most frequent cause of identity theft. Victim defenders argue
that there are many opportunities for identity theft and recommendations for protection are unreasonable
and burdensome. System blamers point to the increasing problem of huge data breeches.
Victim-facilitated burglaries involve unlocked doors and wide-open windows, which make them crimes
of “unlawful entry.” Both the UCR and NCVS capture data on burglaries, but each draws different
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crimes of opportunity is a significant problem. The victim-defending approach notes that only one out of
every eight thefts is key-facilitated, so professional thieves pose a greater threat than joyriders.
Victim responsibility is an issue at many stages in the criminal justice process. Whether or not the victim
facilitated, precipitated, or provoked the offender is taken into account by police officers, prosecutors,
proximity, and/or vulnerability. They may use the routine activities theory, which stresses the interactions
of three key variables: the existence of motivated criminals, the availability of suitable targets, and the
presence or absence of capable guardians. They also may use the lifestyle theory, which stresses the
importance of three aspects of exposure: to high-risk persons, at high-risk location, and during time
periods of high risk.
place in crime prevention measures, moving away from collective actions toward individual responses.
This move is best termed victimization prevention and is much more modest in intent than crime
prevention.
The goal of victimization prevention is to discourage criminals from attacking particular targets, such as
certain homes, warehouses, stores, cars, or people. It asserts that citizens must be more crime-conscious
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KEY TERMS
attractiveness: A differential risk wherein a victim presents little challenge to the offender and the to-be-
stolen possessions are appealing and easily fenced.
avoidance strategies: Actions people take to limit personal exposure to dangerous people and frightening
Consumer Sentinel Network: An identity theft data clearinghouse operated by the FTC.
co-orientation: The act of securing the victim’s cooperation and submission.
co-presence: Establishing oneself within striking distance of an intended victim.
cost–benefit analysis: An approach to weighing the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives. In
economics, it can determine the point of diminishing returns when additional outlays to attempt to achieve
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equivalent group: An explanation for shared responsibility that portrays victims who engage in certain
high-risk deviant lifestyles in a less-than-sympathetic light. It emphasizes that certain pairs of victims and
victimizers share the same interests, participate in the same activities, and are drawn from overlapping or
homogenous lifestyle groups.
hot spots: Localized high-crime areas.
identity theft: A common form of stealing by using another person’s identifying information.
instrumental coercion: Applying force to accomplish a goal.
just world outlook: The belief that people get what they deserve before their lives end.
justifiable homicide: The killing of a person under situations that do not warrant guilt.
expectations that they will seek time-out from normal constraints and act out of character in an anything-
goes environment.
pharming: Attempts to attack legitimate websites with malicious codes that steer traffic to look-alike
sites that “harvest” encrypted online transactions.
phishing: Attempts to fool, entice, or frighten unsophisticated e-mail recipients into disclosing account
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precipitation: The assertion that the individual who gets hurt during the course of a murder, robbery,
assault, or rape significantly contributed to the outbreak of violence.
provocation: The assertion that the injured party instigated an attack that would not have taken place
otherwise.
will become clouded and these individuals are likely to misinterpret each other’s intentions, cues, and
actions, and then behave in a less restrained manner.
shared responsibility: The controversial idea that victim proneness, individual vulnerability, and
personal accountability also may account for one’s misfortunes.
shoulder surfers: Identity thieves who discover passwords by watching their marks at ATMs.
earning respect and recognizing manhood. The resulting constant, spontaneous fights blur the lines
between aggressor and victim.
subintentional death: A term referring to situations wherein those who were killed played contributory
roles by exercising poor judgment, taking excessive risks, or pursuing a self-destructive lifestyle.
system blaming: A tendency within victim defending wherein neither the offender nor the victim is the
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target hardening: Crime prevention via environment design, such as the addition of locks and the
erection of fences.
techniques of neutralization: A criminological theory wherein delinquents frequently disparage their
targets as having negative traits.
theoretical explanations: Descriptions that start as hypotheses that answer questions beginning with the
word, “why,” make an empirical generalization, and then ask, “What accounts for this?”
typology: A classification system that aids in the understanding of what a group has in common and how
it differs from others.
valve theory of crime shifts: A theory that predicts that the number of offenses committed actually will
not drop when targets are hardened because criminal activity simply will be displaced.
ASSIGNMENTS
1. Review the statements for and against scrutinizing the victim’s role that appear in Boxes 5.1 and 5.2.
Select quotes from victimologists with whom you strongly agree and several with whom you strongly
2. Using the Internet, find stories about crimes from your area. Cite examples that help distinguish
3. With a group of classmates, use the FTC website to discover the seriousness of identity theft in your
state and in your nearest metropolitan area. Develop a PowerPoint presentation sharing these results
4. Find more examples of victim-blaming accusations for various crimes by searching through databases
of newspaper and magazine articles. Provide an analysis of commonalities and differences in how the
5. Interview a law enforcement officer, a justice official, and/or a criminal released from jail about their
opinions on deterrence theory. Do offenders learn the appropriate lessons while incarcerated? Does
jail time for offenders affect the actions of would-be criminals? Share your information with the class.
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6. Interview one or more members of your campus police department to determine how student alcohol
consumption affects victims and offenders and their abilities to make sound judgments. Share your
7. Using the boxed information in the chapter, choose one type of crime and perform a personal cost–
benefit analysis. How much risk are you willing to absorb to live as you please? How would you
MULTIPLE CHOICE ANSWER KEY
Chapter 5 You Decide: Shared Responsibility and Prosecutorial Decision-Making
Shared responsibility is the perspective that the offender does not bear total responsibility for the
criminal act and that some of the blame falls either on the victim or on the social system, or both.
While the justice system is interested in holding an offender accountable for the crime, legal statutes
are drafted in a way that requires justice professionals to assess the offender’s intent. This often means
You are an assistant district attorney. You receive a report of a possible sexual assault. A call was
initiated by hospital staff about an hour after the admittance of Mary Reynolds. Reynolds was
transported to the hospital at 2:36 a.m. after a member of her sorority, Melissa Kidd, found her
unresponsive on the floor and called 911. EMS noted in their report that they found Reynolds
naked from the waist down and wrapped in a loose blanket.
Reynolds disclosed she was “doing shots and hits of E” (ecstasy). She admits to vaguely
remembering “dancing with a few guys” but does not remember the events after that. Reynolds
presented to the hospital with a small abrasion on her left forearm and a petite contusion on the left
Let’s review two concepts before you make a decision about this scenario.
Question 1
What approach holds that an injured party is at least partly responsible for what happened to them?
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a. victim blaming
b. victim defending
c. boost explanation
d. flag explanation
Question 2
What perspective denies that an injured party should be held partly responsible for what happened and
finds that the blame falls solely on the offender, or the social system or both?
a. victim defending
b. victim blaming
c. system blaming
d. facilitation