Personal fraud victims and their official responses to victimization

The bulk of the research on predatory crime focuses on characteristics, profiles, and patterns of offenders. This information is important, but from the perspective of police agencies, information about the victims of predatory crimes, including victims of white-collar predatory crimes, and how they officially respond to victimization is also important. Using survey data from a random sample of 400 residents of Knox County, Tennessee, we investigated the characteristics of victims of thirteen different types of fraud. After dividing individuals into categories of non-victims, one-time victims, and repeat victims, we develop profiles of personal fraud victims by examining differences in key demographic and offense characteristics. Next, we investigate the official reporting behavior of victims. The results are instructive for police agencies as they highlight common characteristics of fraud victims and suggest methods for encouraging fraud victims to report their victimization to police.     

What Is Critical Globalization Studies?

From a critical perspective, precisely what kind of knowledge about globalization is meaningful? The distinctive province of a critical orientation to globalization is coming to be defined by a complex of five interacting components: reflexivity, historicism, decentering, crossovers between social inquiry and other streams of knowledge, and an emphasis on strategic transformations. Critical globalization studies may be employed to identify diverse tendencies in world order, parts of a contradictory whole that coexist, with different logics colliding with one another. These are elements of the old configuration, multilateral globalization ; the contemporary structure, militarized globalization ; and the potential constellation, democratic globalization . The motor of transformation is not only countervailing power but also alternative knowledge, which should be demystifying and enabling.