Victimology

Victims of crime have a central role in the justice system as they can provide important information to criminal investigations. At the same time, victims of crime are often particularly vulnerable. The direct consequences of being exposed to crime are often called primary victimization. How an individual reacts after a crime is highly individual. The same type of crime can lead to completely different consequences for different individuals. For some, the consequences are short-term and transient, while others suffer long-term and even chronic consequences. 

Secondary victimization and guilt attribution 

In our research, we have focused on the secondary victimization that can occur after the crime if the victim is treated inappropriately by actors within the justice system, or by the public. For example, that the victim after the crime is questioned or is considered to have "him/herself to blame". Since rape victims have described the secondary victimization as worse than the primary victimization, our research has aimed at trying to understand why people blame certain victims more than others.  

Previous studies (mainly conducted in the UK and the USA) have found that people, especially men, tend to blame rape victims for the rape itself. For example, victims are blamed to a greater extent if they were out late at night, drank alcohol or dressed conspicuously. However, our studies show that in Sweden the public generally believes that the victim has only a low degree of guilt, regardless of who the victim and the assessor are. In addition, our studies show that the people who blame crime victims often have a high belief in what is called "belief in a just world", which means that they believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Thus, their tendency to blame the victim may be because they think people get what they deserve and deserve what they get, and if a person is raped, she/he must be, at least to some extent, to blame for what happened. Our research also shows that those who blame victims have a higher acceptance of rape myths, that is preconceived notions and prejudices about what constitutes rape, who a perpetrator is and who a victim is. For example, they may believe that a rape must contain violence, that the victim always puts up physical resistance and that it is mostly strangers who assault women outdoors. Thus, personal beliefs are more predictive of blame attributions than are situational factors related to the rape itself. 

Attitudes towards crime victims 

We have also studied public attitudes towards victims of intimate partner violence. The results show that both the respondents' own emotional reactions and personal norms control how they view victims of intimate partner violence, and how willing they are to intervene when they suspect intimate partner violence. Those who tend to intervene are those who themselves react with strong anger or sadness when they hear about violence in close relationships. Those who intervene also have a high sense of morality and what is right and wrong and take on the responsibility of acting against the violence. 

Credibility of crime victims 

This research focuses on how people assess credibility and offer social support to victims of crime in the justice system and in everyday life. For example, we have investigated how crime victim’s body language and emotional expressions affect the assessment of their credibility. We have found in repeated studies that people tend to believe that crime victims who show sadness and resignation are more believable, compared to crime victims who do not show these emotions. It is thus more likely that victims who show a certain type of emotion will be perceived as "real crime victims" compared to people in the same position who do not express such emotions. This means that credibility assessments are often based on how the story was told, rather than the content of the story.  

We have identified two reasons why people consider sad crime victims to be the most trustworthy. Firstly, the assessment is influenced by the assessor's own stereotypical expectation of how a victim should behave when talking about their own victimization. Secondly, the assessment is affected by how much compassion the assessor has for the victim. Those who judge that an emotional individual is particularly reliable are those who believe that victims of crime should be sad and resigned and they feel strong sympathy for the victim. In our research, we have also studied the robustness of this effect, which is called "The emotional victim effect". The robustness is studied across different types of crime victims (women and men; children and adults) and across different types of crime (rape, assault, harassment).