和訳をお願いします。
What makes some people more susceptible to mugging, bullying, rape and other crimes of interpersonal violence than others? Of course, being elderly and small in stature can go against us : criminals like to concentrate on people who are easy to exploit. They don’t want their “job” to be any more difficult or dangerous than it has to be, and thus look for targets who send out certain signals.
What are these signals? In a famous 1984 study, two criminal psychologists, Betty Grayson and Morris Stein, asked prison inmates convicted of violent crimes to watch a video of pedestrians walking down a busy city street. The pedestrians had no idea they were being taped. The researchers then asked the convicts one at a time to identify which people on the tape would make the “best” victims. Grayson and Stein found that the inmates consistently chose the same people, and for the same reasons. And it wasn’t just old people and small women who were chosen; these were often passed over in favor of large men. In fact, race, age, size, and gender had little to do with the selections. Instead, they involved several other factors that indicated to the convicts a sort of “victim mentality”.
In an article entitled “Marked for Mayhem” in the February 2009 issue, Psychology today says that criminals assess their victims on several nonverbal signals, including posture, body language, walking speed, and awareness of surroundings. “These cues are what psychologists call ‘precipitators’, personal attributes that increase a person’s likelihood of being victimized”. But the authors, Chuck Hustmyre and jay Dixit, don’t want readers to reach the wrong conclusion. “Whether victims are selected randomly or targeted because of specific characteristics, they bear no responsibility for crimes against them. But by being aware of which cues criminals look for, we reduce the risk of becoming targets ourselves.”
お礼
ありがとうございました。 助かりました。