Week 4: Who are the victims?

This week we looked at what we know about crime victims, and how we know about crime victims.

For this blog post I want to make two points, and tell an old story involving a zebra.

Firstly, our knowledge is incomplete. This is a common problem with social statistics: this is the reason why the news doesn't report the number of unemployed people, but always gives the number of those out of work and claiming benefits. Just as nobody knows precisely how many people are not working, nobody knows precisely how many crimes are committed. We do know precisely how many crimes are recorded by the police, but we also know that lots of crimes aren't - which is why we use figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales. But the CSEW is a sample-based survey - they ask roughly 50,000 people about their experiences of crime, then multiply out to give an estimate of the number of crimes in the country as a whole. So there is no precisely accurate, "God's eye view" figure for the number of crimes that are committed. What's more, because it's a residential survey completed by adults, we know that the BCS is highly unlikely to record crimes against some groups of people: for example, children, dependent elderly people, students living in halls, people of no fixed abode...

Every statement about crime levels should be followed by "as far as we know".

Secondly, crime is highly patterned (as far as we know). And the ways in which it's patterned aren't entirely surprising, if you think about deprivation and social injustice generally. Living in a neighbourhood with "high levels of disorder" is associated with a higher risk of crime. Black and minority ethnic people are statistically at a higher risk of crime than Whites, even if we're only talking about "colour-blind" crimes like burglary. Almost half of all victims of domestic violence are repeat victims, suggesting very strongly that domestic violence is - as feminists say - part of a continuing relationship of unequal power. There are also some interesting and very significant findings about age: sorry to bring bad news, but if you're under 25, your statistical risk of crime is much higher than average, particularly if you're living alone or with other young people.

Thirdly, the zebra story. A man was so terrified of being in a railway accident that he avoided travelling by train at all. Eventually he decided to approach the problem rationally and spent a long time trying to work out ways of making train travel safer. He concluded that his best option was to travel everywhere with a horse, because there were far fewer train crashes when the train had a horse on board than when it didn't. When someone asked if he was happy like that - presumably meeting him coming out of a railway station leading his horse - he said he couldn't help feeling he should have held out for a zebra. The statistics did record one or two train crashes when there had been a horse on board, but none at all involving a zebra.

If this was true, would taking a zebra with you on a train makes you safer? Obviously not - but why not? Similarly, if (according to police figures) 20% of domestic burglaries involve the burglar getting in through an open window, does this mean that leaving a window open is actually safer - since, after all, 80% of burglaries didn't involve an open window? Again, this conclusion seems wrong, but why?

The zebra example is fairly easy. Let's say that 1 in every 1,000 train journeys ends in a crash (the real figure is much lower, of course). Then let's say that there are a million train journeys in a year, and 2,000 of them involve somebody transporting a horse. Then there will be 1,000 train crashes, out of which 2 involve a horse and 998 don't. But that doesn't mean that travelling with a horse is safer, just that it's rarer: the rate of crashes is the same (2 out of 2,000, 998 out of 998,000).

As for the open windows, we need a couple more pieces of information to work that one out. According to official figures, the annual risk of burglary is 2.5% - unless you've got "no home security measures" (which we'll translate as "windows left open"), in which case it's 25%. So 20% of burglaries are from the "open windows" group of properties, but if you are in that group you have a 25% chance of becoming one of those burglary victims. If you're in the "closed windows" group, you have a less-than-2.5% chance of becoming one of the other 80%. (It's less than 2.5% because the 2.5% risk is averaged out over all households, including the ones with their windows open.)

Now, say you're looking at a city of 4,000,000 households (imaginary figure). In any one year, 2.5% of them will be burgled: there will be 100,000 burglaries (ignoring repeat burglaries for the time being). 20,000 of those burglaries will be of households with open windows (20% of 100,000 = 20,000). But we also know that households with open windows had a 25% risk of being burgled - and that tells us that, overall, there are only 80,000 households in the city which leave their windows open. (There's a joke here about how many of those are in Fallowfield, but I won't stoop to it.) This is the crucial missing piece of information: 20% of burglaries are of households with an open window even though there are very few of them. 20% of burglaries occur in 2% of households (80,000 / 4,000,000 = 0.02 = 2%). The other 98% have a risk of burglary which is even lower than 2.5%; in fact it's just slightly over 2% (80,000 / 3,920,000 = 0.204 = 2.04%).

In the horse/zebra example, the numbers look so different because a single rate (of train crashes) is applied to two very different populations (the number of train journeys on one hand, the much smaller number of journeys involving a horse on the other). The 'open window' example is more complex because there are two different rates: a low rate for a very large population, a much higher rate for a very small one.

Why does all this matter? It matters because we need to know the underlying numbers in order to make sense of the statistics - and making sense of the statistics is vital if we're going to get an accurate picture of questions of power, injustice and social exclusion in our society. Suppose you hear that 5,000 Romanians have entered Britain in the past year: what does that mean? Is it a lot? Is it ten times as much as the previous year, or half as much? ten times as many Romanians as Poles, or half as many? Or suppose you hear that 100 Manchester residents of Asian origin were arrested for shoplifting in the past year, but only 20 Chinese - does this tell you that the Chinese population of Manchester is five times as law-abiding as the Asian population? If not, why not?



PS According to Manchester City Council, the main ethnic groups in Manchester are as follows:

White	66.7%	347,000
Asian	14.4%	75,000
Black	8.6%	45,000
Mixed	4.7%	24,000
Chinese	2.7%	14,000
Arab	1.9%	10,000
Other	1.2%	6,000

Week 3: The 'Ideal Victim'

This week we looked at Nils Christie's paper "The Ideal Victim".

Christie argued that we have a lot of preconceptions about what a victim ought to be like. The result is that how much recognition we give to actual victims of crime depends on how closely they fit the model of the 'ideal victim'.

An 'ideal' victim is vulnerable, relative to the offender; blameless, relative to the offence (they didn't do anything to make it happen); weak enough to be somebody who people want to look after; but not so weak, socially speaking, as to be overlooked completely.

An old woman mugged by a young man fits the description of an 'ideal victim'; a young man mugged by another young man doesn't (not vulnerable enough, and generally not different enough from the offender).

A woman attacked on her way home fits the description; a woman attacked outside the back door of a nightclub at 3.00 a.m. doesn't (not blameless enough - what was she doing there?).

An old man whose purse is stolen with his pension in it fits the description; a CEO whose wallet is stolen doesn't (too powerful to need us to look after him).

Lastly, an old man attacked at random on a Friday night fits the description - but if it's an old homeless man, he doesn't (too powerless to have any claim on our sympathies).

Needless to say, these aren't recommendations of how we ought to think, but descriptions of how (perhaps) we do think. And if we want people to take somebody seriously as a victim, we do tend to emphasise how weak they are and how virtuously they were acting at the time of the crime. This makes it possible to draw a nice clear line between the victim (weak, innocent and one of us) and the offender ("a dangerous man coming from far away" in Christie's words).

Of course, the "weak innocent victim"/"big bad stranger" model is very far from being typical of actual crimes. Most victims aren't totally innocent and virtuous in their conduct (why should they be?), and most offenders aren't predatory strangers. So the more we think in terms of the 'ideal victim', the harder it is to see actual victims of crime, and actual offenders, for what they are.

When you're thinking about actual victims of crime, and the ways in which they may have been failed by the criminal justice system, it may well be worth thinking back to the 'Ideal Victim' - and how it's used to limit the support and sympathy that's given to actual victims.

The 'Ideal Victim' - despite the name - is not an ideal. It's a standard that some victims meet, but many don't; in fact, probably most victims don't meet it. And we shouldn't ask them to.

Week 2: What is a victim?

This lecture starts with a very straightforward question - and answers it in a complicated way.

First, we looked at the definition of 'victim of crime' - somebody who's suffered as the direct result of an illegal action - and asked what happens when we take it literally. Victims of crime are people we sympathise with, people who we feel deserve something: what happens if we restrict that mental category to people who have been directly affected by a crime? It turns out that what happens is quite unsatisfactory: there are lots of cases where we want to think of somebody as a victim of crime, even if they haven't been directly affected (relatives of murder victims), even if no law has been broken (white-collar crime), even if years have passed between the action and its effects (work-related injury).

In other words, there's a constant pressure to expand the category of "victim of crime" to include people who haven't been directly victimised, or people whose victimisation wasn't actually a crime. There is no correct answer to the question of how far the category should be expanded: if a murder victim's partner is also a victim, what about her close friends? work colleagues? old schoolfriends? But the literal approach - narrowing down the category to actual victims of actual crimes - is clearly unsatisfactory.

Second, we looked at how symbolically loaded the experience of being a victim can be. The sense of violation that burglary victims often feel isn't just an emotional reaction to having the room messed up. Ideas of personal continuity and of an 'ordered world' are very deeply rooted in our psychology. Becoming a victim of crime - having your 'safe space' or your bodily integrity violated - can be deeply disturbing, destroying feelings of security which we thought we could rely on. Ironically, this experience is often all the more upsetting for people who previously felt confident and self-reliant; attitudes of fatalism and keeping your head down aren't ideal as far as getting on in life is concerned, but for recovering from being a victim of crime they're very appropriate.

Perhaps the key point about the symbolic experience of being a victim is that it's one that we've all had, whether or not we've been a victim of crime - and we all know how upsetting it is. I think this has a lot to do with the way we think about victims of crime. We want those who deserve sympathy to get it - just as we'd want it for ourselves: so we expand the category of 'victim of crime' to include asbestosis victims, Bhopal victims, victims' relatives and so on. At the same time, we don't want anyone who doesn't deserve sympathy to get it, so we watch victims suspiciously to see whether they're sufficiently deserving or not.

Maybe it's possible to step out of this difficult psychological terrain altogether, and talk about avoidable suffering and harm without labelling those who suffer as 'victims'. Writers in the 'social harm' school (such as Richard Garside and Paddy Hillyard) argue that many forms of avoidable harm don't have an identifiable 'offender' at all: if we keep thinking in terms of individual victims being hurt by individual offenders, we may be focusing attention on the wrong thing.

On the other hand, the experience of being a victim - and the sympathies which victims arouse - are universal and powerful; perhaps the concept of victim is valuable and needs to be held on to. (At least for the duration of this unit!)