Victim Precipitation Criminology

The theories I wish to compare-and-contrast are victim precipitation theory and behavior genetics. Victim precipitation theory can only be applied to violent victimization but it is a theory that says by acting in certain ways that you are making yourself vulnerable for victimization and opening a chain of events that lead to your assault, homicide, rape, or robbery. Like all criminology theories, victim precipitation relates to how and why crime happens. While most theories focus on the acts and intentions of the offender, victim precipitation seeks to understand the interaction between the victim and the offender. Now behavior genetics is a branch of genetics that studies the relative contributions of heredity and environment to behavioral …show more content…
Well in this situation we would use victim precipitation theory, now we find out that they had an argument before the murder took place, the argument was started by Cynthia who kept provoking her husband who then started to yell and hit Cynthia. Cynthia goes to her bedroom gets his gun and shoots him, now we have just found out motive for crime, what provocation was, and who was the victim and offender. With these things, we would know exactly if the victim should be prosecuted and if so for how long would meet the standards of proper punishment. The weakness with victim precipitation theory is victim blaming. A lot of times you find people going by this method seeing the provocation of the offender than saying it’s the victims fault for initiating the attack. Victim precipitation theory is very helpful but must be used with open mind if not you can find yourself making the offender seem like what they did was never wrong. Now behavior genetics would help this situation become more understandable by telling us that Cynthia grew up in an abusive home environment which molded her to become so quickly aggressive when faced with violence and altercations. We also see that the MAOA gene is less present in her but more present in the husbands meaning the she could’ve been the more aggressive person in the argument meaning she …show more content…
Victim precipitation theory must be thoroughly studied before being applied so that you don’t make the mistake of letting the victim get off easily or blaming the victim. Also, that Behavior genetics says a lot about a person. It can tell you if they are more likely to follow a path of crime or develop anti-social disorders and characteristics. Along with victim precipitation it helps find out motive, background, and punishment length, but must be used carefully and studied deeply so that punishment is given out correctly and proper care for victim and offender are seen on both sides. These theories taught me to look at the victim as having taken part in their own demise while also studying how to avoid being the victim by taking certain precautions when faced with situations. It showed me how an offender could be so violent, uncaring, and criminal because of his or her environment and