Abstract
One main target of victim surveys is to draw a more realistic picture of crime by asking people whether they had suffered a criminal incident during a given reference period (mostly twelve months). The same instrument is usually employed for the study of the causes and consequences of victimization as well. This leads to some serious methodological and substantive problems. The differentiation between victims and nonvictims might be erroneous because by using short reference periods victims are excluded and thereby turned into nonvictims, although they may display the behavior and attitudes of victims. On the other hand, the commonly observed memory decay is treated as a methodological bias although forgetting can be a decision not to accept the role of a victim as well. Thus, the victim in a legal sense is ‘in fact’ a nonvictim. These problems will be discussed by using some empirical data from a German study on restitution and punishment, with victimization as one of the independent variables.
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