CA18121 - Cultures Of Victimology: understanding processes of victimization across Europe (COV-E)

 Victimology as an academic endeavour has shown a remarkable growth in the past decades, and although victims are no longer the ‘forgotten party’ of the criminal justice system, the increased attention has been both topically and geographically lopsided. Victims of certain forms of criminal behaviour (domestic and sexual violence for instance) have commanded the lion’s share of academic and policy interest, and the research on victim’s experience is mainly conducted in North America, Oceania and North-West Europe. This results in more rapid advances in certain areas of victimology, while elsewhere basic victimological questions have yet to receive an answer.

This COST Action intends to develop an innovative, functional and overarching theoretical framework for cultural victimology. Understanding the mediating and moderating influence of cultural constructs on victimology will improve understanding of the extent to which the current victimological knowledge base can be generalized from the types of victimization and geographical locations that have been relatively extensively studied to elsewhere. A greater grasp of this complexity in return will offer greater insight into the underlying causal factors of this current research base, as well as offer new perspectives and lines of inquiry. It is, therefore, not only to the benefit of understanding the current grey and dark areas of victimological research, but will also shed further light on those fields of knowledge that have already been more heavily illuminated.