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I. INTRODUCTION
Crime victims used to be ignored by criminologists. Then, beginning slowly in the 1940s and more rapidly in the 1970s, interest in the victim's role in crime grew. Yet a tendency to treat the victim as either a passive target of another person's wrongdoing or as a virtual accomplice of the criminal limited this interest. The concept of the victimprecipitated homicide' highlighted the possibility that victims were not always blameless and passive targets, but that they sometimes initiated or contributed to the escalation of a violent interaction through their own actions, which they often claimed were defensive.
Perhaps due to an unduly narrow focus on lower-class male-onmale violence, scholars have shown little openness to the possibility that a good deal of "defensive" violence by persons claiming the moral status of a victim may be just that. Thus, many scholars routinely assumed that a large share of violent interactions are "mutual combat" involving two blameworthy parties who each may be regarded as both offender and victim. The notion that much violence is one-sided and that many victims of violence are largely blameless is dismissed as naive.
A few criminologists have rejected the simplistic mutual combat model of violence, though they sometimes limit its rejection to a few special subtypes of violence, especially family violence, rape, and, more generally, violence of men against women and of adults against children.2 However, the more one looks, the more exceptions become evident, such as felony killings linked with robberies, burglaries, or sexual assaults, contract killings, mass killings, serial murders, and homicides where the violence is one-sided. Indeed, it may be more accurate to see the mutual combat common among lower-class males to be the exception rather than the rule. If this is so, then forceful actions taken by victims are easier to see as genuinely and largely defensive.
Once one turns to defensive actions taken by the victims of property crimes, it is even easier to take this view. There are few robberies, burglaries, larcenies, or auto thefts where it is hard to distinguish of fender from victim or to identify one of the parties as the clear initiator of a criminal action and another party as a relatively legitimate responder to those initiatives. The traditional conceptualization of...