Lab Report

As Karmen (2015) discusses in the text, there are varying levels of shared victim culpability for criminal acts. This most recent laboratory exercise led to several learning outcomes, including allowing me a better understanding of how some criminal acts occur and ways in which some types of crimes may be avoided moving forward.
This laboratory assignment clearly demonstrated the utility of assigning shared responsibility for criminal acts; the lab report did not involve assigning "blame" to any of the victims, but instead attempting to understand how the victims' actions could have contributed to the crimes that took place. An example of this is found in the victim facilitation portion of the lab exercise, where the victims' actions (posting information on Facebook) led the residential burglaries to occur. The victims’ posting was how the perpetrators picked their burglary targets. The point of assessing responsibility in this type of criminal act is not to fault the victims for posting information, but to learn how to avoid similar outcomes in the future, like being more careful about distributing personal …show more content…
In my own personal experience, I have known crime victims who contributed to their own victimization. An acquaintance of mine had his car stolen after inadvertently leaving his car window open when parked on a public street. Though this person did not intend to have his car stolen, his actions (negligently leaving the car window open) did cause the crime to occur, placing him in the victim facilitation level of responsibility. In another instance, an acquaintance became an example of victim provocation, when he instigated a fight, but was eventually bested by the other person, becoming the victim; though he was seen as the victim, he held significant blame for the fight starting at