Homicide The Hidden Victims

Social scientist, victim advocate, and the mother of a murder victim - Deborah Spungen is well acquainted with all facets of what she defines as "the blackest hell accompanied by a pain so intense that even breathing becomes an unendurable labor." In Homicide: The Hidden Victims, Spungen illustrates just how and why family members become co-victims when a loved one is murdered, and she poignantly addresses the emotional, physical, spiritual, and psychological effects of such traumatic events. The timely information and innovative modalities discussed in this book make it ideal for mental health and criminal justice professionals, pastoral counselors, social workers, and victim advocates.

Social scientist, victim advocate, and the mother of a murder victim - Deborah Spungen is well acquainted with all facets of what she defines as "the blackest hell accompanied by a pain so intense that even breathing becomes an unendurable labor." In Homicide: The Hidden Victims, Spungen illustrates just how and why family members become co-victims when a loved one is murdered, and she poignantly addresses the emotional, physical, spiritual, and psychological effects of such traumatic events. The timely information and innovative modalities discussed in this book make it ideal for mental health and criminal justice professionals, pastoral counselors, social workers, and victim advocates.

Annotation In the US, murderers, particularly those sentenced to death, are usually considered as entirely different from the rest of us. Sociologist Susan F. Sharp challenges perspective by reminding us that those facing a death sentence, in addition to being murderers, are brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, daughters or sons.

When mentally deranged Ken Franck kills four people, he shatters the lives not only of their families, but of his own family. However, his other victims refuse to let hate destroy them. When the victim's son marries, his best man is the murderer's son.

“Honest and moving . . . Her painful tale is engrossing.”—Washington Post Book World For most of us, it was just another horrible headline. But for Deborah Spungen, the mother of Nancy, who was stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel, it was both a relief and a tragedy. Here is the incredible story of an infant who never stopped screaming, a toddler who attacked people, a teenager addicted to drugs, violence, and easy sex, a daughter completely out of control—who almost destroyed her parents’ marriage and the happiness of the rest of her family.

Echoing Durkheim's Suicide, this book focuses on one important phenomenon to explain larger currents in American society. Leonard Beeghley examines the historical and cross-national dimensions of homicides and evaluates previous attempts to explain it. He finds the sources of America's murder rate in the greater availability of guns, the expansion of illegal drug markets, greater racial discrimination, more exposure to violence, and sharper economic inequalities. He deftly blends the evidence related to each of these factors into a well-reasoned sociological analysis of the nature of American society.

Victimology and crime prevention are growing, interrelated areas cutting across several disciplines. Victimology examines victims of all sorts of criminal activity, from domestic abuse, to street violence, to victims in the workplace who lose jobs and pensions due to malfeasance by corporate executives. Crime prevention is an important companion to victimology because it offers insight and techniques to prevent situations that lead to crime and attempts to offer ideas and means for mitigating or minimizing the potential for victimization. .In many ways, the two fields have developed along parallel yet separate paths, and the literature on both has been scattered across disciplines as varied as sociology, law and criminology, public health and medicine, political science and public policy, economics, psychology and human services, and more. The Encyclopedia of Victimology and Crime Prevention provides a comprehensive reference work bringing together such dispersed knowledge as it outlines and discusses the status of victims within the criminal justice system and topics of deterring and preventing victimization in the first place and responding to victims' needs. Two volumes containing approximately 375 signed entries provide users with the most authoritative and comprehensive reference resource available on victimology and crime prevention, both in terms of breadth and depth of coverage. In addition to standard entries, leading scholars in the field have contributed Anchor Essays that, in broad strokes, provide starting points for investigating the more salient victimology and crime prevention topics. A representative sampling of general topic areas covered includes: interpersonal and domestic violence, child maltreatment, and elder abuse; street violence; hate crimes and terrorism; treatment of victims by the media, courts, police, and politicians; community response to crime victims; physical design for crime prevention; victims of nonviolent crimes; deterrence and prevention; helping and counseling crime victims; international and comparative perspectives, and more.