Last Updated on September 26, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Being a victim of crime does not end when the crime does. The effects are physical, emotional, financial and social, they can last for years, and for some victims the worst part is what happens afterwards — in the police station, in the courtroom and in the press.
Sociologists call that second part secondary victimisation, and it is the concept worth learning from this topic.
This post covers material for the crime and deviance module, AQA Paper 3 (7192/3), and links directly to victimology.
The scale of the harm
One figure frames everything else. When the Home Office estimated what crime costs society, physical and emotional harm to victims came to £28.7 billion a year — 47% of the total cost of crimes against individuals.
Not stolen property. Not police time. Harm to people.
The Home Office also estimates how long that harm lasts, and it assumes up to five years for the longest-lasting effects — specifically the drug dependence, alcohol dependence and eating disorders associated with rape.
That is an official government document stating that the harms of a single crime are still being counted five years later.
The impacts
Physical
Injury is the obvious one, but it is not the most common. For violence with injury, the Home Office estimates £1,060 per offence in health service costs against £9,060 in physical and emotional harm — the lasting damage is mostly not the kind that gets treated in A&E.
Physical effects reported by victims also include difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite, and the physical symptoms of prolonged anxiety.
Emotional
The most commonly reported effects are anxiety, anger, depression, loss of confidence and fear of the crime happening again. Victims of burglary frequently describe the sense of intrusion as worse than the loss of property — which the cost estimates bear out, since emotional harm is a larger component of the unit cost of burglary than the police and court response combined.
Financial
Beyond anything stolen, victims lose income. Lost output — time off work and reduced productivity at work — is estimated at £9.8 billion a year, the second largest single cost category. For a victim of violence with injury, that is £3,240 per offence.
This is where victimisation and inequality meet. Statutory sick pay does not replace a full wage, and insecure workers may have no sick pay at all. The same crime costs a salaried employee and a zero-hours worker very different amounts.
Social and behavioural
Victims change what they do. They avoid places, stop going out after dark, move house, install security. Some withdraw from friends and family. These changes rarely appear in crime statistics, but they are a real narrowing of everyday life — and the Home Office notes that its estimates exclude quality-of-life effects and the harm to victims’ families entirely.
Secondary victimisation
Secondary victimisation is the additional harm a victim experiences from the response to the crime, rather than from the crime itself.
It comes from three directions.
From the criminal justice system
The process can require a victim to repeat an account of the worst experience of their life to strangers, repeatedly, over months or years. In court, a defence barrister’s job is to undermine that account, which can mean a victim being publicly accused of lying or of having invited what happened.
Delay compounds it. In 2024, the median wait from charge to completion at Crown Court was 150 days for White defendants and 243 days for Black defendants — and every one of those days is also a wait for the victim.
Feminist criminologists have made this argument about rape trials for decades: that the trial process functions as a second assault, and that this is a substantial part of why only 14.7% of the most recent sexual assaults are reported to the police (ONS, year ending March 2025). If the process is itself harmful, not reporting is a rational decision.
From the media
Victims can be identified, photographed, doorstepped, and have their private lives examined in public. Where a victim does not fit the image of an innocent victim, coverage can shift towards blame.
Hillsborough is the clearest case in British history. Ninety-seven people died in 1989 and were then blamed for their own deaths, in a national newspaper front page four days later and in police briefings that continued for years. The Hillsborough Independent Panel found in 2012 that 164 police statements had been significantly amended, 116 of them to remove material unfavourable to the force. It took until 2016 for an inquest to find the victims had been unlawfully killed and that no behaviour by supporters contributed.
From family and community
Victims are asked why they were there, why they did not fight back, why they had not locked the door. Victim-blaming is not confined to institutions.
Why this matters sociologically
It connects to both perspectives on victimology. Positivist victimology’s concept of victim precipitation is, applied badly, secondary victimisation with a theory attached. Critical victimology argues the state’s power to withhold the victim label is itself the source of the harm.
It explains the dark figure of crime. If reporting produces further harm, under-reporting follows. The ONS asks about domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking in a self-completion module precisely because people will not say these things aloud to an interviewer.
It is changing, slowly. The Public Office (Accountability) Bill — the Hillsborough Law — would place a statutory duty of candour on public authorities and give bereaved families legal representation at inquests on a par with the institutions they face. It passed the Commons in July 2026 and is before the Lords. It responds to Hillsborough, Grenfell, Infected Blood and Windrush together.
Where this is useful in the exam
- Evaluating positivist victimology. Secondary victimisation is the sharpest criticism available: an approach that asks how victims contributed to their victimisation risks producing the harm it studies.
- Evaluating official statistics. Harm from reporting explains under-reporting, and under-reporting is the dark figure.
- Any question on victims. The 47% figure is the most efficient single statistic here, because it comes from the Home Office rather than from a sociologist.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA A-Level Sociology course, Paper 3 (7192/3).
For the two perspectives, see victimology: positivist and critical approaches.
For what crime costs in total, see the economic and social costs of crime.
For crime’s effects at the level of society, see functionalist explanations of deviance.
For a 10-mark answer on victimisation and social class, see this Paper 3 question.
Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com
Sources
Home Office (2026) Economic and Social Costs of Crime 2019 to 2020. Office for National Statistics, Sexual offences in England and Wales, year ending March 2025. Ministry of Justice (2025) Statistics on Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System 2024. Hillsborough Independent Panel (2012); inquest findings, April 2016. Public Office (Accountability) Bill 2024–26.