Page "Critical criminology" Paragraph 12

All of the above conflict perspectives see individuals as being inequitably constrained by powerful and largely immutable structures, although they to varying degrees accord to humans a degree of agency.

Ultimately, however, the relatively powerless are seen as being repressed by societal structures of governance or economics.

Even left realists who have been criticised for being ‘ conservative ’ ( not least by Cohen 1990 ), see the victim and the offender as being subject to systems of injustice and deprivation from which victimising behaviour emerges.