Property Victimization

Property Victimization

Introduction

The fields of criminology and criminal justice have focused, historically, on understanding criminal offending in comparison with criminal victimization. However, a variety of paradigm shifts, scientific advances, and social and political forces since the 1960s and 1970s provided a foundation from which theories of victimization emerged.

For instance, in the latter half of the 20th century, a shift occurred among many scholars toward viewing “crime” as more than just the behavior of an offender. Instead, crime became increasingly viewed as a “system,” involving not only an offender but also a target or victim, as well as a time/place context that supports or facilitates the victimization of the target by the offender (Sherman and Buerger, 1989).

Alongside this new paradigm, new sources of information about crime emerged, addressing limitations of data compiled from police reports (reported annually in the form of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program). Specifically, the early 1970s marked the emergence of the National Crime Survey (now called the National Crime Victimization Survey), which allows large amounts of information on crime events from the vantage point of victims to be collected and analyzed annually. This national effort set the stage for many subsequent victimization surveys in local communities and/or on special samples (i.e., high school students, college students, women, etc.). These various victimization surveys, i n comparison with official police data, allowed researchers to estimate more accurately the incidence and prevalence of crime in society because they measured crime events, whether or not they were reported to police.

Finally, beginning in the 1960s, a sociopolitical movement intended to provide more attention to victims and their rights within the criminal justice system. In response to this movement, more support services began to be provided to victims, and avenues were provided for allowing enhanced involvement on the part of victims in the process of justice (i.e., through victim impact statements).

The confluence of these various sociopolitical and scientific shifts was ideal for the emergence of various theoretical perspectives on victimization. These etiological perspectives focused on a wide range of causal influences, which ranged from routine daily activities and lifestyles, to interpersonal interactional dynamics, to broad-based social inequality (Schreck, 1999).

Offending and Victimization

Criminological research has consistently shown that offenders are much more likely than nonoffenders to be victims and that victims are much more likely than nonvictims to be offenders. In other words, victims and offenders are often the same individuals. For example, the 2006 sweep of the U.K. Home Office's Offending, Crime and Justice Survey found that, for 10- to 25-year-olds, 50% of offenders had also been victims of a personal crime in the past 12 months compared with 19% of nonoffenders; levels of offending were also higher among those who had been a victim compared with those who had not been a victim, 42% versus 14%. Furthermore, across numerous pieces of research, this victim-offender overlap holds for survey and police recorded data, for single and repeat victimization, for personal and property crime, for adults and juveniles, for males and females, and for ...