The auithors comment that -
For policymakers and practitioners, these results reaffirm existing literature on the challenges faced by victims of crime throughout the community. More importantly, they serve as a reminder that the experience of victimisation is not evenly shared across the population, but instead concentrated among already socially isolated groups in our community. Other practitioners in the field of criminology and victimology have referred to this as the 'principle of homogamy' — the notion that victims and offenders often share similar socio-demographic characteristics and that those people who live near or in a similar socioeconomic context to offenders are those with the greatest risk of victimisation .... This has obvious consequences for the measurement of victimisation using national instruments where methodologies under-sample such populations.Among specifics -
Further, while there is no data in this study to implicate victimisation as a primary cause of a person’s initiation into offending, there is some evidence to suggest that for those already involved in crime, victimisation may be one of a number of important factors that influences reoffending. For criminal justice practitioners involved in the community-based supervision of offenders, knowledge of victimisation and its likely consequences could prove important in reducing recidivism and thereby improving outcomes for individual offender case management programs.
• 58% of all detainees who had their motor vehicle stolen reported the most recent incident to the police. Of those who did not, the majority thought that the matter was too trivial (25%) or private (25%) to report; 17% did not report the incident for fear that the offender would be punished.The authors comment that -
• Half of the detainees who were burgled (52%) reported their most recent experience to the police. The most common reason given for not reporting a burglary was that the police would not do anything (31%), although again, it was not uncommon for detainees to state that the burglary was too trivial or private to be reported.
• For all three crime types, a sizable proportion of detainees recorded 'other' reasons for not reporting their most recent experience to the police. When asked to elaborate, common responses included 'I sorted it out myself', 'Don't trust the police' and 'I just didn't feel like it'.
Of those detainees who were physically assaulted in the previous 12 months, a greater proportion of females than males reported their assault to the police (38% versus 31%) and older detainees aged 36 years and over were more likely than younger detainees aged 18 to 25 years to report their assault (45% versus 28%). Of those who did not report to the police, female detainees were more likely than males to indicate that the matter was too private (31% versus 21%) whereas males were more likely to indicate that the matter was too trivial to report (19% versus 3%).
For victims of motor vehicle theft and burglary, the numbers were too small to provide any meaningful analysis of the reasons for not reporting by gender and age.
In all cases except one, the expectation of future victimisation was higher than the experience of past victimisation; that is, more people feared crime than had experienced it. The one exception related to assault among female detainees, where the prevalence of actual physical victimisation was higher than their expectations of victimisation in the future (41% experienced versus 36% expected).In discussing the reporting of victimisation the authors note that -
The experience of assault was found to be higher among younger detainees aged between 18 and 25 years (34%) than those aged between 26 and 35 years (29%) or 36 years and older (26%). Motor vehicle theft victimisation was generally consistent across the age distribution (3–4%), whereas burglary victimisation was more commonly reported by detainees aged 26 years or older (11%) compared with younger detainees aged between 18 and 25 years (7%).
Comparative analysis with the weighted sample of respondents from the 2004 ICVS showed that rates of victimisation in the general population are much lower than among police detainees. For example, police detainees in this study were six times as likely to report having been the victim of a physical assault (30% versus 5%), four times as likely to have had their motor vehicle stolen (4% versus 1%) and three times as likely to have been burgled (10% versus 3%).
Detainees who reported having been a victim of assault, burglary, or motor vehicle theft were asked whether they had reported the most recent incident to the police and if they had not, their reason for not reporting. The results indicated that One in three detainees (33%) reported their mostrecent assault to the police; two in three (67%) did not. Of those who did not, the majority thought that the matter was too private (23%) or too trivial (16%) to report, while one in 10 (13%) were afraid of reprisal. ...
Across the three crime types, a large number of adult detainees said they did not report their victimisation to the police as it was a private matter. This may be partly attributable to the large proportion of detainees who claimed to have known the person who committed the offence against them. For those self-reported victims of physical assault, two in three (62%) reported having known the offender. Although not as high, the proportion of burglary (40%) and motor vehicle theft victims (35%) who knew their offender was still unexpectedly high, since for these two crime types (given their low clearance rates) it is commonly assumed that victims and offenders are unknown to each other).
Nearly all female detainees (90%) who had been physically assaulted in the past 12 months claimed to have known their offender on the last occasion, while this was the case for only 55 percent of males who had been physically assaulted. These findings are consistent with previous research that has shown that men are more likely to be assaulted by strangers and women are more likely to be a victim of assault by someone they know, such as an intimate partner. Female detainees who were victims of a burglary, were also slightly more likely than male detainees to have known
their offender (46% versus 38%).
A similar question was asked for assault victims in ICVS, with results indicating that 44% of the general population claimed to have known their offender, which was substantially lower than was reported by police detainees as a whole (62%). Women were again more likely than males to claim to have known their offender (59% versus 42%), although these levels were substantially lower than those reported by police detainees for both females (90%) and males (55%).
