Abstract
The fall in the rate of violent crime has stopped. This is a finding of an investigation using the Crime Survey for England and Wales, 1994–2014, and an improved methodology to include the experiences of high-frequency victims. The cap on the number of crimes included has been removed. We prevent overall volatility from rising by using three-year moving averages and regression techniques that take account of all the data points rather than point to point analysis. The difference between our findings and official statistics is driven by violent crime committed against women and by domestic perpetrators. The timing of the turning point in the trajectory of violent crime corresponds with the economic crisis in 2008/09.
Highlights
Is violent crime increasing or decreasing? From the 1960s, crime has increased in Europe and North America; but since the mid-1990s, crime dropped (Blumstein and Wallman 2006; van Dijk et al 2012); there are claims of a long-run fall in violence in Europe (Elias 1994 [1939]; Pinker 2011; Eisner 2014)
Taking into account the most recent evidence, and differentiating by gender and domestic relations, the question this paper addresses is whether the rate of violent crime is rising or falling
We investigate the changes in the rate of violent crime captured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and disaggregate these by the gender of the victim and the relationship between the perpetrator and victim
Summary
Is violent crime increasing or decreasing? From the 1960s, crime has increased in Europe and North America; but since the mid-1990s, crime dropped (Blumstein and Wallman 2006; van Dijk et al 2012); there are claims of a long-run fall in violence in Europe (Elias 1994 [1939]; Pinker 2011; Eisner 2014). There are exceptions to the crime drop; some of these have been linked to gender and domestic relations. Taking into account the most recent evidence, and differentiating by gender and domestic relations, the question this paper addresses is whether the rate of violent crime is rising or falling. The analysis of the gender dimension of violent crime has largely taken place in a specialist field relatively separate from that of mainstream criminology (Walklate 2004). Much criminology that addressed the crime drop has written little about gender (Sharp 2006); analyses of gender-based violence or violence against women have rarely addressed changes over time, though with important exceptions. We consider the implications of mainstreaming gender into the analysis of violent crime, rather than treating it as a separate field of domestic violence or violence against women
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