Childhood Victimization: Violence, Crime, and Abuse in the Lives of Young People
Abstract
ABSTRACT
This book presents a vision of childhood victimization, one that unifies the conventional subdivisions like child molestation, child abuse, street crime, bullying, and exposure to community violence. It shows how children are the most criminally victimized segment of the population, with over one-in-five facing multiple, serious “poly-victimizations” during a single year. Developmental Victimology, the book’s term for this new integrative perspective, looks at how victimization changes across the span of childhood and offers insights about how to categorize juvenile victimizations and how to think about risk and impact developmentally. It presents new data about unexpected declines in childhood victimization during the 1990s and early 2000s and suggest some of the reasons for this drop. The book also provides a new model of society’s response to child victimization — the Juvenile Victim Justice System — and a fresh way of thinking about barriers that victims and their families encounter when seeking help.
Department
Sociology
Publication Date
2008
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195342857.001.0001
Document Type
Book
Recommended Citation
Finkelhor, David. Childhood Victimization: Violence, Crime, and Abuse in the Lives of Young People. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.