Hans von Hentig

Hans von Hentig (1887-1974) was a German-born criminologist who studied law and worked in politics and academia in Germany before emigrating to the United States in 1935, where he later held positions including at Yale University. In his 1948 book The Criminal and His Victim: Studies in the Sociobiology of Crime, developed from an earlier 1940 journal article, he introduced a systematic study of the crime victim's own contribution to the genesis of an offense, proposing a typology dividing victims into general classes and psychological types, a dynamic approach that stood in contrast to criminology's earlier near-exclusive focus on the offender. His work is widely credited as one of the founding contributions to the discipline of victimology and as the basis for later theories of victim precipitation.