Repeat Victimization in the ICVS and the NCVS
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Repeat Victimization in the ICVS and the NCVS Graham Farrell, Andromachi Tseloni and Ken Pease1 Overall, 40 per cent of crimes reported to the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) in 2000 were repeats against the same target within a year, with variation by crime type and country. However, policy makers have yet to realise the potential of victim-oriented crime reduction strategies. A preliminary comparison of repeat victimization uncovered by the ICVS and the US National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) finds ICVS rates are double those of the NCVS. The NCVS may be seriously flawed in the manner in which it measures repeat victimization, and hence crime overall. Further study is needed, but since the NCVS is an influential survey, the possibility that it is misleading may have widespread implications for crime-related research, theory, policy and practice in the United States and elsewhere. Key Words: Repeat victimization; repeat victimisation; International Crime Victims Survey; National Crime Victimization Survey Introduction Crime prevention resources are scarce and, ceteris paribus, should be allocated where crime is most concentrated. Prolific offenders, hot spots, hot or frequently stolen products, and repeat victimization are studied because they manifest crime’s tendency to cluster (Tilley and Laycock, 2002). Repeat victimization is the present focus, but it has important overlaps with these others. It overlaps with hot spots insofar as repeat victimization of the same targets generates spatial concentration on a map, and because victimization increases risks for nearby potential targets (Townsley et al, 2003; Johnson et al, 2004). Repeat offenders disproportionately commit repeat victimization (Everson, 2003), so targeting the latter may prove an efficient means of detecting the former. Preventing repeat victimization is not necessarily straightforward, but it is emerging as central to community safety practices and victim support services (see Farrell (2005) for a recent review). The measurement of repeat victimization (sometimes termed ‘rv’) is therefore far more than solely a technical issue— it may have direct consequences for local, national and/or international community safety practices and crime control policies and for their evaluation. More broadly, due to the significance of repeat victimization in the overall makeup of crime, its improper measurement could have significant implications for the development of criminological theory and for the overall orientation of criminological enquiry. Hence measurement issues can be profoundly important. While previous work has examined the measurement of rv using police recorded crime data (Farrell and Pease, 2003), particular aspects of crime victim surveys are the subject of the present study. The first section of this paper reviews methodological issues relating to the measurement of repeat victimization using the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS). This is followed by an overview of rates of repeat victimization found in the survey’s 2000 sw
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