Childhood victimization

About this book

"Children are the most criminally victimized segment of the population, and a substantial number face multiple, serious "poly-victimizations" during a single year. And despite the fact that priority in academic research and government policy has traditionally been given to studying juvenile delinquents, children actually appear before authorities more frequently as victims than as offenders." "In this book, David Finkelhor presents a new vision to encompass the prevention, treatment, and study of juvenile victims, unifying conventional subdivisions such as child molestation, child abuse, bullying, and exposure to community violence. Developmental victimology, his term for this integrated perspective, looks at child victimization across childhood's span and yields insights about how to categorize juvenile victimizations, how to think about risk and impact, and how victimization patterns change over the course of development. The book also provides a new model of society's response to child victimization - what Finkelhor calls the Juvenile Victim Justice System - and a fresh way of thinking about barriers that victims and their families encounter when seeking help. These models will be useful to anyone seeking to improve the way we try to help child victims."--Jacket.