Victimization surveys: recent developments and perspectives

Abstract

The deve lopment of v ic t imizat ion surveys started in the late sixties when the first modern-day 2 surveys of criminal vict imization were carried out in the USA funded by the Pres ident ' s Commiss ion on Law Enforcement and the Adminis t ra t ion of Justice (cf. Sparks, 1981). The original intention of these pilot studies was to develop a measure for cr ime that would be independent of the decisions and defini t ions inside the criminal just ice sys tem (Block and Block, 1984). Vict imizat ion surveys were seen as a means for overcoming the bias of police crime statistics and promis ing a solution to the problem of hidden crimes (dark figure) caused by unreported and/or unrecorded criminal incidents. Furthermore they were seen as a data source offer ing much more information on victims, offenders, and the consequences of criminal v ic t imizat ion than the police crime statistics. In 1972 the first US National Crime Survey was carried out and was repeated annually ever since. This survey had a high impact and many countries fol lowed the United States using methods derived f rom the NCS. Today national vict imizat ion surveys have been conducted in many countries, and in some of them, as for instance Great Britain (Mayhew and Hough, 1991; Mayhew and Maung, 1992) and the Netherlands (Van Dijk, 1991), they have been carried out repeatedly, thus al lowing analyses of national trends in vict imizat ion rates and report ing behaviour . However , as Block (1993) quite recently has shown, despite the fact that most national v ic t imizat ion surveys have the same origin the US National Crime Survey compar ison of the results o f vict imizat ion surveys of different nations is very difficult due to di f ferences in methods and range of crimes covered. Until 1989 there had been few regional studies that a l lowed for crossnat ional compar ison, as for instance the studies of Arnold, Kor inek and Teske (Teske and Arnold, 1991; Arnold and Korinek,