Victim Surveys

Victim surveys (1)

a research method that asks a sample of people to self report any crimes committed against them over a specific period, whether or not those crimes were reported to the police.

 

The British crime survey is more widely knows as the crime survey for England Wales. Much research refers to the BCS, so the terms BCS and CSEW are used throughout this section.

 

Involves surveying people about which crimes they have been victims of in a given period. (They are likely to include some crimes which have not been reported to the police)

CSEW (1)

One of the largest social surveys conducted in Britain.

• Currently measure all those 16+ and those aged 10-15 in their parents surveys

 

35,000 adults and 3,000 children per year. Respondents are interviewed in their own homes by trained interviewers using a structured questionaire that is administered on a laptop computer.

 

The CSEW tends to show that crime is much higher than the police figures suggest, for some crimes up to 4 times higher.

CSEW (1)

The CSEW has been succesful at developing special measures to estimate the extent of domestic violence, stalking and sexual victimisation, which are probably the least reported to the police but among the most serious crimes in their impact on victims.

 

Strengths (1)

• They reveal the unreported and unrecorded crimes that never make it into offical police statistics (uncovers the ‘dark figures of crime’)

• They avoid and bypass insitutional bias, recording incidents even if officers choose not to log them. They also encourage disclosure, people may feel more confortable disclosing sensitive or minor offences to researchers than reporting them directly to police.

Strengths (2)

• They gather vital demographic data on victims - such as gender and social class, highlighting patterns of social inequality in victimization. The large scale studies such as the CSEW track long term patterns and crime rates more reliably than changing police reaching practices.

Maguire (2002) has pointed out there has been a huge increase in the amount of statistics gathered. Since the 1970’s information has come to be gathered on wider aspects of crime.

Weaknesses (1)

• Victimless crimes, or crimes where the ‘victim’ is a large corporation, such as a fare evasion or shoplifting, will not appear. on victims my not respond, not seeing the survey as relevant to them, which could result in an overestimation of crime.

• Only people over 16 have been asked in the past so crimes with child victims were not picked up, but this how now changed, Response rate is 75% potenitlly missing important data. Response rates. If the response rate is low, this affects the representativeness of the final sample and the generalisability of the results.

Weaknesses (2)

Young 1989, argues that the ‘dark figure’ is also present in victim surveys, for various reasons. The accuracy of victim surveys relies on the memory and honesty of the victim.

• Some people may get the timescale wrong and people may not tell the truth for various reasosn, including shame or guilt

• Peoples threshold of crime may differ

Stats (1)

More than half of women stated that fear of crime meant that they did not often or ever go out - the Islington crime survey 1986

 

The Islington survey found a considerable higher rate of sexual victimisation, due to the non-reporting of sexual and domestic offences through official channels.

Garland (2001) - data explosion and the risk society

suggests that it is not just an expansion of knowledge for its own sake that has driven the explosion of statistical information. He suggests, instead that the answer can be found within the concerns of late modernity.

 

During modernity, governments took upon themselves the task of controlling crime and punishing criminals.

 

Most people believed that the government had crime control in hand. Garland suggests that in late modernity, there is a much greater sense of uncertainty and risk and governments are no longer believed to catch and punish all criminals.

Garland (2001) - data explosion and the risk society

Instead statistics on crime have increased so that it can better access and manage the risk. Garland has introduced the notion of ‘responsibilities’ - part of risk management is to push responsibility for avoiding becoming a victim of crime back onto individuals.

 

The statistics are part of this process of informing individuals how best to avoid becoming victims of crime.