Victimology

Video Transcript

[How would you define victimology?]

· 00:16

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: Victimology is the study of really all things victim. This includes who becomes victims of violence, which may or may not be a crime. It's the response to the victimization. It's their interaction with the criminal justice system or other seeking resources. And that's pretty much how I describe it to the students. [What is the value in learning about victimology?]

· 00:42

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: Oh, I think it's valuable for anybody to learn about victimology. I mean at a minimum, people are going to probably not make it through life without being victimized in some way or at least having somebody they know or close to a friend or a family member who are victimized. So it's important to understand these sorts of things so that you can respond to their needs well. You might be in a position where you're helping to create policy that might assist people who have been victims. So it's important to know it.

· 01:08

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: And it's also important to understand risks so that we're living our lives carefully, but not fearfully. If you understand what risks of victimization are, where victimization tends to happen, then you're not being afraid of going out and things like that. [What first inspired you to start academic work in the field of victimology?]

· 01:29

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: Like most of the good things in my life, I stumbled on it blindly. I actually was kind of laughing. I oozed out of the swamp in the political science world, fell in love with data research methods, found myself in a sociology program also a little bit earlier. But I finished my PH.D. Out of political science with just a love of data and research methods. I was looking online and found a position at the Department of Justice that used a big dataset and thought this is awesome.

· 02:01

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: So I ended up coming to DOJ and working with the National Crime Victimization Survey. And at that time, I'd never had a criminology class in my life and I'd never even heard of the data. So I actually think there were advantages to that. Because I started sitting down with the data and answering questions that I had, which I think are questions that a lot of people in the public have-- very basic questions. And educating myself in writing articles and I think the substantive newness was great for me, because I was exploring and investigating. And of course, then over time you realize this is useful for policy

· 02:31

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: and it's actually helping people, which I think's a vital part of any of the work I do. I've got to think that it's somehow making the world a little better, even for a little. I was raised in Texas in a conservative household and I was curious about race and victimization. And like a lot of people, my thoughts are that whites were victimized at much higher rates than other groups. And so I wanted to run the data to see this. And to my great surprise, it wasn't the truth. I also thought that older people are victimized more, and that isn't the truth either. And so pretty much all of the stereotypes

· 03:04

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: that I was raised believing and the culture kind of perpetuating, turned out not to be the case. And so I thought, these basic questions are so important for people to know. So often, especially if we're talking about race and criminology type things, you say a black male and people think offender. And I decided that I wanted to do work to change that-- a little bit hopefully. And so if you talk about a black male, I want them to ask the question, do you mean as a victim or as an offender?

· 03:34

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: Because we know their rates of victimization are quite high, but most people don't recognize that. I thought that females were victimized far more than males, and in certain types of violence that's the case-- sexual violence and intimate partner violence, there's no doubt about that. Although some people might disagree with me, but I have no doubt about it. But I think it's important for people to understand that young males are victimized at incredibly high rates. And young males need to know that so they can think a little bit about where they're going, what risk is, ways they can protect themselves.

· 04:02

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: I just think those are really important for all of us to understand. [What new research directions do you find most exciting, and where would you like to take your own research?]

· 04:11

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: There's so much I want to do and there's so little time to do it. And I still find myself going back to methodological questions and definitional questions and analytic technique questions. I love looking at reporting violence to the police. And recently I've kind of changed my perspective on it. Instead of working from the foundation of gosh, why doesn't everybody report to the police? We should report to the police. I think that's backward. I think I need to find out, why would anybody report to the police?

· 04:45

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: And approach it with kind of some basic assumptions being challenged. That's a part of it. I've done a lot of pieces with reporting much to the police, but as a faculty member as all of us are, as you're chasing tenure and trying to get more publications, I don't feel like I've had time to sit down and look at all of what I've done and everybody else and put it into a whole, like synthesize it. What gaps remain? What can we do that's really helpful? I mean how many more regressions can I run looking at reporting violence to the police? They're all saying the same thing at this point. So what new ways can I look at it? And that's one new direction I've taken is using conjunctive analysis to pay more attention

· 05:19

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: to situational context that are associated with outcomes versus variables. Variables are great, but we all know context matters. Conjunctive analysis, the way the analysis works, it's made me recognize that-- this is so difficult to articulate-- that I don't think that when somebody is faced with reporting violence to the police that they think should I report to the police? I think it's far more complex than that. And right now, the way the data are set up I don't know that we can address it in other ways. So I think people do a series of questions.

· 05:48

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: Should I report it to the police? Should I not report it to the police? They're not two sides of the coin. They're very different decisions. And the choices they make together somehow determining whether they go forward or not. And that's going to require more qualitative research simply. [What are some of the key challenges of victimology research?]

· 06:07

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: I think one of the challenges of victimology research is there's a fear to ask certain questions. And I think there are questions that need to be asked, but there is a fear of being accused of victim blaming. If you're looking at a situation in which an individual was victimized, I think we need to look at the entire situation. And unfortunately, if you look at certain elements of it, people say that you're blaming the victim, and it's not. There's a difference in understanding what are elements of a situation that contribute

· 06:40

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: to a higher probability of victimization versus blaming the person. So I do hope over time, continuing to be sensitive about victim blaming, because nobody's a fan of that, we can ask some of the harder to ask questions. So that's one of the things. I think another thing that makes victimology a little extra difficult is the lack of theoretical development. This is not to say we do have theory. There is development, but I wish we had a lot more of it going on. So much of the work is atheoretical.

· 07:07

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: When I was a graduate student, I had to take a theory development class and I was terrible at it. And I'm so sad that I don't have an opportunity to do that again or the time. And I wish all grad programs required this so that we have students coming out who can help to develop theory and give us more to work with. And also the tie between the data that we have and the theories that are out there, often there's a disjoint between the two so we can't test them very well. That's really frustrating.

· 07:37

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: The third item I think is just the lack of time that we all have. And this isn't specific to victimology, it's just to the academic world. And that is that you've got a job, you've got pressure to publish, you've got service you're doing, you've got teaching you're doing. I think most people want to do a great job at all of them and they do that. But it comes at a cost of using a lot of time. And there's so little time to stop and think deeply about the work we're doing versus getting it out, getting it in the system.

· 08:06

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: Because if you're on a six-year tenure clock, that goes by very, very quickly. You write a paper, it takes a year. You send it out for review, that could be a year. You get an R and R and it's a little more time. Next thing you know it's your three-year review. So I wish somehow the system were set up to give us more time to think more deeply and not pay the price. [Are there any major academic debates in the field of victimology?]

· 08:30

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: I think some of the major debates, I mean I'm sure there are a lot of debates, but the ones that interest me most have to do with definitions and measurement. Definitions of a lot of things-- I mean in the social sciences and victimology we're studying concepts that are really difficult to define and measure. And for that reason, there's never going to be agreement. And I don't think that's necessarily bad. I think having a variety of definitions and a variety of measurement give us a richer understanding

· 08:58

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: of whatever the concept is. I mean, rape is a great example of that. There's a wide variety of the ways that it's defined and there's a wide variety of the ways that it's measured and so there's a lot of debate about estimates of it in other things. I do hope that the debates never get in the way of us realizing that we're all on the same team, and we're all trying to move the knowledge forward for the benefit of society. I hate sometimes when I see some debates where there's actual anger between people about the way things are done. I think there's room for all of it. [How important are research methodology and methods for a rigorous analysis of victimology?]

· 09:35

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: You cannot study this, understand it, conduct research, you have got to have a strong foundation in methods and in statistics. By methods I mean all of it-- qualitative methods, quantitative methods, mixed methods. It's so, so important. At a minimum, even if somebody is not going to go on to become a researcher, you may be in a position to help create policy or administer services to people who benefit from it. You have got to be able to understand

· 10:04

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: what's going on in research papers and it's not that hard to do. And I know that they're not maybe the most fun reading, but there are ways to get that and you've got to be a critical consumer of the information. You've got to ask those questions. What is the definition used? What is the measure used? And I think that-- I mean being the critical consumer just helps you everywhere. One of the problems is a lot of people are not that critical of consumers of information. For that reason, we get numbers that are repeated over and over and over again that aren't true. They're not right. They're not even what the original research said,

· 10:35

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: but people are repeating it, policy's being based off of it, people are changing their lives off of it. And it's not for the better. So I just think it's the most important part of things that people can do as a student, but even as somebody after you've moved on, when you're reading information, you're being given the information, be a critical consumer of it. And methods and stats are a part of that. [How important is theory in the study of victimology?]

· 10:57

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: That's a great question for me. I've been accused of having a lot of atheoretical work, and in a way it's true. And that kind of goes back to an earlier thought that I had on the lack of theory in victimology, and again, not to say that we don't have any, but I wish we had more. And I wish we had more that we could test, because a lot of our data doesn't align with it. I think it's vitally important and until the field continues to mature and we get more, well we're going to do some exploratory work

· 11:29

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: and maybe develop information that might help develop that theory. But I think it's as important as good methods and good stats. [How has the field changed in recent years, and what developments do you consider most significant?]

· 11:41

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: I was going to say-- but this isn't true for victimology and criminology is the gender change. It used to be and this is university-wide, too. More and more of our students are female, which is certainly great, but I hope that we don't become all of one of anything. So it's been a really interesting change. Victimology especially, I think is one. I think what surprised me most in changes in recent years

· 12:09

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: is topics of interest. Sex trafficking-- human trafficking is huge right now. Pretty much every student who comes into the program. I get calls from students thinking about the program and they want to know what we're doing about sex and human trafficking. You didn't hear this from students even three years ago. We've had discussions asking where are the males going. And I'll go to say community colleges to give a lecture and talk about victimization. And one of the things I try to talk to them about is the importance of getting an education.

· 12:39

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: Because whether they come to where I am or they go anywhere, they need to continue to get an education. And these community college classes are at least 50% male, if not more. Then you look at bachelor students, where I am, and other people've talked about this, too, and the ratio is much smaller. And then at the grad level, at least in criminology, victimology and sociology classes are dominated by female students. I'm not really sure what it is, but it's very interesting. And there is one benefit of it, too, is that people are a little more interested in studying people like them.

· 13:09

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: So we've got a lot more people working in the victimology field, which I think is fantastic. Nothing bad can come from that. [Why do you think there has been a growth in research focused on violent victimization?]

· 13:19

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: I think there's a couple of reasons for it. I think a and this touches on technology. The technology has allowed it. It's allowed us to gather data from a larger group of people in a quicker time. So you can gather data. You have now the technology and the computing power to analyze it, and analyze it in a lot of different ways. I mean it wasn't that long ago that you can look at some old articles and the most sophisticated thing they have in there is a two- or three-way cross tabs. Well, it wasn't because people didn't

· 13:51

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: think there were other ways, that was the computing power available. Now we can gather data, go download it from my CPSR, get it set up, run an analysis and in a day or two have regression completed. That wasn't like that before. So I think that has contributed a little bit to growth. [Can you provide any examples of key research in the field that has has a direct impact on policy?]

· 14:13

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: There are a lot of examples of it. One that's sort of contemporary has to do with violence against college females, especially. So there's been some victimization research looking at, but that's gone back for a long, long time. It's hardly new research, but it just seems to get more attention right now. And as a result of this, there have been policies made by universities to protect students and to educate students about risk of victimization.

· 14:43

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: But also from outside, policies changed to tell universities how to deal with it. I don't think all of the changes are necessarily positive, but I think it's important that universities are at least focused on it and being held accountable for their actions. You cannot ignore that stuff anymore. [Why do you think that recently there has been more focus on victimology research?]

· 15:03

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, PHD: Mary Koss has looked at this for decades and it got a lot of attention because people argued a lot about definitions, but it just didn't resonate into the mainstream. I think one reason just having this discussion is Jon Krakauer's book, Missoula. So he wrote this book. It's a really excellent book. It's talking about one place, but people read it. Now they're saying, wow, there's a problem.

· 15:30

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: You've got other documentaries like The Hunting Ground that's getting a lot of public attention. So it's got people, I don't know kind of riled up to focus on it, and they're demanding things being done. I think as a researcher who's done this for a little while and certainly not as long as some other people who are great researchers out there, there's a little part of me that's sad that that's what it took for the public to hear it. But you know if that's what it takes for the public to hear it and understand there's a problem that we need to really focus on it seriously, then that's OK. My discussion this morning, my panel this morning, actually focused on this. And it has to do with definitions and measurement

· 16:05

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: and it's the conflating that's happening between campus crime and violence against college students. A lot of this is looking at females only. Those are very different things. And we know and we've known from research back into the 70s that campuses are relatively safe places, but college students are victimized at very high rates, primarily off campus. So I think we have to be careful as researchers and keep beating the drum so that the public is educated. That it's not that campuses that are necessarily the dangerous places. That this is an age group and there are some other things

· 16:35

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: that are going on with this particular population that put them at higher risk. But they need to know where that is. I have had people who've come to me and said that they're not going to send their daughters to college because they fear they're so dangerous now. So we have to be careful about what that is. And my presentation today showed that the rate of victimization for college students off campus is 12 times that of on campus. That said, I've got national estimates of this, but every campus is very different, because they vary in many ways.

· 17:05

CALLIE MARIE RENNISON, [continued]: Dormitory populations-- this is associated with higher on-campus victimization. Fraternal organizations, sport organizations, is it rural, is it nearer unemployed, you know urban areas? So it's really important for somebody to understand the campus that they're interested in. Not to take one, any one estimate out there and apply it to all campuses, because they're all very different.

This video will review victimology. To gain understanding of the data from which we gain our knowledge of victimization, go to the following,  Data Collection: National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS (Links to an external site.) ).

Question

Explain the methodology for gathering data in the National Crime Victimization Survey for the United States and explain possible weaknesses in this survey.

Do other countries have data on victims?

350 words excluding references, APA format and a minimum of 3 references