A central concern of any legal system should be to protect the rights of victims and to deliver them justice. Yet society is always ambivalent about the rights of, and its obligations to, the weak, the injured, and the disenfranchised. Victims challenge the meaning structures that provide the social definitions of reality and, particularly when they focus awareness on the tenuous nature of people's control of their lives, they are prophets of doom and therefore easily shunned. Victims characterize a series of issues that cause considerable discomfort to the premise of social control and organization and are easily stigmatized to diminish the threat they pose. In this context, the paper addresses the following questions: attitudes and reactions to victims; the dimensions which influence people¦s responses to victims; the forces that have served to identify and advocate the needs of victims; and the issues which influence the way that victims are dealt with by the law, medicine, and society. References