What is a victim?

Forensic scientist Brent Turvey has pondered this question for years. Turvey is a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man with more than a passing resemblance to actor Robert Downey Jr. Indeed, like the superhero Downey portrayed, Turvey is something of a real-life forensic Iron Man who jaunts from his remote aerie in Sitka, Alaska, around the world to help solve some of the world's most difficult crimes. Turvey's website URL, http://www.corpus-delicti.com, sums up his criminological focus. Corpus delicti is Latin for “body of crime”; it refers to the principle that a crime must be proven to have occurred before a person can be convicted. Corpus delicti is one of the most important concepts in a murder investigation.

Turvey is the kind of quick-thinking, brash, in-your-face consultant who is a blessing if he is on your side and a hellion if he's on the other. But whatever work he does, and whichever side he works for, Turvey is an unabashed advocate of truth—regardless of how unpleasant, surprising, or dissonant that truth might be. In Malcolm Gladwell's brutal New Yorker essay on the chicanery behind FBI profiling techniques, Turvey pulled no punches as he vented, “The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons. You've got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn't want to see her. It could mean he doesn't want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can't just look at one behavior in isolation.”2

VICTIMOLOGY

Turvey's Forensic Victimology: Examining Violent Crime Victims in Investigative and Legal Contexts, written with Wayne Petherick, has already become a classic in the field.³ The book complements Turvey's Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis and a range of other books and articles.⁴

Turvey earned a master's degree in forensic science to go along with his double set of bachelor's degrees in psychology and history. He is an anomaly—he writes academic volumes, but he's not a typical academician. Rather than sit ensconced in an ivory tower, studying victims in an isolated academic petri dish, Turvey makes his living as a senior partner in Forensic Solutions, LLC, consulting as a forensic scientist in the investigative or trial phase for both law enforcement and attorney clients around the world. He focuses on the examination and interpretation of the crimes that make up people's worst nightmares—assault, rape, homicide, serial homicide, autoerotic death—and he is also an expert on fetish burglary and staged crime scenes. Turvey testifies in court about issues in all these areas and also about cases that involve criminal profiling, criminal investigation, crime reconstruction, and victimology.

Turvey and Petherick collaborated on Forensic Victimology because there was nothing like it available. The pair had found that, in an age where ideology has crept on little cat feet into many areas, professionals were being discouraged from approaching victims with the skepticism that good science requires. Victimization, Turvey notes, is not always simple.

An interesting example is that of twenty-six-year-old Tanja Morin of Lancaster, Ohio, who called 911 to report that her 2-year-old son, Tyler, was missing. She tearfully explained to the dispatcher: “The only way he could have went is through the back, and the only way you can get the fence open is if somebody kicked it from the outside…. Somebody had to come through the yard.” The call was made at 10:51 a.m.

Tanja's husband, Michael, immediately came home from work to help in the search for Tyler. He found the couple's youngest child at 11:22 a.m., in a garbage dumpster less than a block away from their home. Had he been left in the dumpster much longer, the heat would have killed him; it was one of the hottest days of the year.

During the initial police investigation, the mother's kidnapping story succumbed to realistic victimology and fell apart. A nearby surveillance camera had captured the activity at and around the dumpster before, during, and after Tyler was reported missing. On the surveillance stills, Tanja can be seen walking hand-in-hand with her youngest son in the alley near the dumpster at 10:35 a.m. A minute later, she can be seen leaving towards her home alone.

Tanja confessed to detectives that she hadn't meant to hurt Tyler, only to create an emergency that would get her husband to come home from work. According to police, she told them, “He wanted to spend money today that we didn't have, and I was trying to think of a way he could come home so he didn't have to spend the money that he had.”

Tanja was arrested that day, and charged with attempted murder, child endangerment, and kidnapping. At first, she pled not guilty. The judge subsequently ordered her to submit to a psychiatric evaluation. In November of 2007, she pled guilty to kidnapping, child endangering, and felonious assault charges.

In this case, the mother lived in a severely dysfunctional family where she was apparently convinced that the benefits of creating a false crisis outweighed the potential consequences to her or anyone else. Taken at her word, she was actually a victim of her husband's financial irresponsibility and was acting with good intentions. Certainly her actions were enough to warrant a psychiatric evaluation—something that would not necessarily occur to the court if a man were facing the same charges. In cases of domestic violence and even homicide, women are often treated by the justice system as victims in need of help, and men are viewed as aggressors deserving of punishment. Such distorted views, based on cultural archetypes, can result in diminished responsibility, or at least sympathy, for the mother.

The objective, scientific victimologist would [refrain] from taking this mother or any other alleged victim at [her] word, as this case and many others demonstrate that the institution of motherhood is not inviolate. Even a mother claiming to have the best intentions can put [her] child in a garbage dumpster and lie about it, if [she thinks] there is something to be gained.5

THE SANCTITY OF THE VICTIM

As Turvey cogently summarizes, no culture or institution is beyond doubt, examination critique, or redress in the study of victims and purported victims—not “the ‘sacred bond’ between a mother and her child; not the culture of law enforcement; and not the ‘objective’ forensic examiner. Within each there are those who are willing to distort or fabricate victimity because they perceive a cultural reward for doing so.”⁶

The real problem, of course, is that some victims are truly victims in the classic sense of the word. Compassion for victims is there for a reason—there are often innocent victims. They have done absolutely nothing to contribute to the unfolding of a crime. Some cases are truly black-and-white. Who couldn't feel for a grandmother crying as she gazes toward the wreckage of her lifelong home left by a tornado? Or for the youngster who loses his beloved kid brother to cancer? Or the parents of a young woman abducted in broad daylight from a shopping mall, then raped and murdered?⁷

But sometimes the situation enters into various shades of gray. People can play different roles in their victimization—from something as simple as leaving a door unlocked to an act as darkly complex as a woman putting her own child in a Dumpster.

Every culture has different perspectives on crime and its victims. In modern Western culture, the dominant view at present is the “sanctity of victimhood.” This “refers to the belief that victims are good, honest, and pure, making those who defend them both righteous and morally justified. Conversely, it suggests that those who doubt them are immoral and unjust in their tasks.”8 This sweeping cultural assumption is unwarranted and runs contrary to the scientific method. As Turvey notes: “Victimization is a method for absolving persons of responsibility. When trouble emerges, an ‘innocent’ party—the object of the injury or trouble—can be specified by assigning victim status to one or more persons, thus exempting them from blame.”⁹ In other words, “one is constantly reinforced with the notion that being a victim freezes the normal course of daily events and thereby shifts responsibility and accountability, if only temporarily.”¹⁰ At school or in the workplace, if people become ill, suffer a death in the family, or have a personal tragedy, they are treated with special indulgence.

The very fact that victims are perceived differently and given special dispensation means that there can be an incentive—whether conscious or subconscious—to be a victim. We cringe to even think victimhood claims could be false (what if we're wrong!), but false victims can be a real, and horrific, problem. The point is not to lay blame but to keep an open mind and to look at each situation anew. Sweeping, unchecked assumptions, in science, in the justice system, or in any realm, do a disservice to the truth we hold to be sacred and to the systems we rely on for their integrity, no matter how effectively they may advance some ideological agendas.

Systems can become bogged down responding to people crying “Wolf!” For example, as one Eyewitness News episode reported recently, Alfredo Garcia now makes a living as a serial plaintiff. He has filed more than five hundred lawsuits against small businesses who see him as a small-time thug and legal extortionist. Garcia, an illegal immigrant and convicted felon (for selling weapons and crack and for vehicular burglary), fell out of an avocado tree while drunk and has since been in a wheelchair. Garcia's “days are spent going from business to business looking for violations like a bathroom mirror or a paper-towel dispenser that's too high.”¹¹ Garcia is not alone in his vocation—his lawyer has a roster of similar serial litigants scouring the region for businesses that can vest plaintiff's counsel with an entitlement to attorney's fees. Behavior like this could be useful in helping businesses see things from the point of view of people in wheelchairs, but violators of the Americans with Disabilities Act are not given notice or a chance to correct the problem—they are simply sued, often at taxpayers’ expense. “Wouldn't conciliation and voluntary compliance be a more rational solution?” wrote Judge Pressnell in a Florida ruling related to this type of behavior. “Of course it would, but pre-suit settlements do not vest plaintiff's counsel with an entitlement to attorney's fees.”12 Elizabeth Milito, senior counsel for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, notes that the extreme expense of such litigation prompts many businesses to simply settle claims that are even without sound basis.¹³

Even some disabled-advocacy groups are beginning to speak out against such lawsuits. Andrew Imparato, president of the one-hundred-thousand-member-strong American Association of People with Disabilities, said: “There are these individuals and boutique firms that make a business out of filing 75 claims at a time. It leads to a strong backlash against the ADA, and it can do harm to the cause of increasing access for those with disabilities. The point of this law is not to shake-down businesses. The point is to improve accessibility.”¹⁴

The unrelenting, one-dimensional focus on the sanctity of the victim, dismissing those who would take advantage as rare aberrations, has not only created problems for real victims—it has created new victims. The reporting of fake crimes, as Athens-Clarke, Georgia, police captain Clarence Holeman has noted, “is becoming an epidemic.” Police departments are being forced to take a stance, since the increasing number of false claims of victimhood are drawing investigators away from legitimate crimes.¹⁵

In a more explicit example, Kristin Ruggiero recently bragged to her ex-husband, “I took all your money, I took your daughter, and now I'm going to take your career.”¹⁶ She then sent herself dozens of threatening messages on a phone she had purchased and registered in her ex-husband's name. It was only then that her criminal efforts to portray her husband as an incorrigible batterer were exposed. As columnist Carey Roberts goes on to note:

This tale is not so much about a distraught woman sorely in need of psychological help. Rather, it's a story of a police department, a prosecutor, and a judge that allowed themselves to be duped by a conniving perjurer. And it's about a criminal justice system that has all but abandoned due process in a frenzied attempt to curb domestic violence.

Like everything in the law, the problem begins with definitions. The Violence Against Women Act, passed during the first term of the Clinton administration, includes a definition of domestic violence that is so wide you could drive a Mack truck through it. States picked up on the loophole, and now most states include within their definitions of abuse, actions like making your partner “annoyed” or “distressed.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) likewise followed suit. The CDC's Uniform Definitions and Recommended Data Elements declares that partner violence includes “getting annoyed if the victim disagrees,” “withholding information from the victim,” and even “disregarding what the victim wants.”

Note the CDC's repeated use of the word “victim.” In VAWA-speak, a victim does not need to be a prostrate body lying in a pool of blood. Rather, a mere accusation elevates you to the status of victim. No proof of violence is necessary.17

Again, some people really are victims. But we cannot operate a society and uphold its laws if we can't think critically. Unfortunately, critical thinking in this area is discouraged. If a person claims victimhood, to question that claim is regarded, in our culture, as unchivalrous. We are particularly programmed to view women as victims who need our sympathy, while men are aggressors who deserve to be punished. Such unexamined assumptions do a disservice to the truth inherent in each individual situation. Even in cases in which the assumption ultimately proves true, to have made the assumption, uncritically, is itself inherently unjust.

There are people, of course, who are comfortable questioning people who feel victimized. Skip Downing, a former English professor who also holds an advanced degree in counseling psychology, has developed a highly successful national program for teaching at-risk college students to change their behavior and excel. Downing's secret? He teaches students not to think like victims. You overslept the day of the test? Why did you stay out late the night before? And why didn't you have two alarm clocks? Couldn't get a ride to school? Why didn't you have a backup plan? Always had a problem with math? Why aren't you going to the tutoring center?

The slightest hint of victim-thinking—I had to go babysit my sister's kids, so I couldn't come take the test—earns a V symbol from Downing or those trained in Downing's “On Course” methods. In this case, the V doesn't stand for victory. It stands for victim—and it means “Stop it!”18

But Downing's down-to-earth approach to removing the unquestioned sanctity of victimhood, effective though it is, is an unusual phenomenon in a Western culture that prides itself on helping the less fortunate—a culture that is inclined to think that someone who claims or feels victimized is always innocent.

Real victims, whose hardships are beyond what many can fathom, deserve no less justice.