Victim Categories of Crime Revisited

Abstract

When Marvin Wolfgang asked me to co-author, Victim Categories of Crime (Wolfgang and Singer 1978), he transformed my status as an anonymous graduate student into one that was committed to his way of doing criminology. Victim categories of crime set the stage for my dissertation, and a research agenda that saw crime less as a product of the actions of an offender, and more as an event to be described and understood in ways that go beyond any simple, unidirectional analysis. Previously, I had completed a proseminar paper on the development of the National Crime Panel victimization surveys. I came into the graduate program in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania after having completed a Master’s thesis at Northeastern University on the elderly as victims of crime. Wolfgang knew of my interest in the emerging study of victims, and for that reason I believe asked me to join him in revising his article. The original version of Victim Categories of Crime first appeared a decade earlier in a German publication honoring Hans von Hentig (Wolfgang 1967). Wolfgang wanted to see an English version of the article published, and one that would take into account recent developments in the emerging study of the victim.