Immigrants as Victims: A Framework

Abstract

Concern for immigrants as victims of crime or immigrant victims' access to justice has been scarce. The lack of research on the victimization of immigrants is undoubtedly related to the difficulty of obtaining valid data on the immigration status of crime victims. Another reason for the lack of research on immigrants as victims is what researchers working within the social constructionist tradition would describe as the process of defining victim categories and of 'making claims' (Spector and Kitsuse, 1977) on behalf of those categories. Victim-activists have been remarkably successful at placing a variety of victim categories and victim issues on the public agenda including elder abuse, hate crime, child abuse, intimate partner violence, and crime against the elderly. The fact that they have not cast 'immigrants' in the role of star victim' does not necessarily mean that concern about immigrant victimization does not exist at all. Rather, it is because certain immigrant troubles have been subsumed under politically hotter topics, such as 'hate crime' and 'domestic violence'. The articles included here reflect the fragmented and thin state of our knowledge about immigrants as victims of crime. Each of the articles makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the various dimensions of this increasingly significant problem. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)