Only one in 20 offenders in the UK get charged. This is because of two main reasons: Tory funding cuts leading to declining police numbers and the increasingly complex nature of crime.
Only one in 20 offenders now get charged, according to a recent BBC Panorama documentary: Will my Crime get Solved…? For burglaries, only 4% of home burglars are charged.
And in 39% of crimes police fail altogether to identify a suspect.
The documentary does the ususual job of combining case studies and interviews with experts who drill down into the statistics.
The case studies are with three victims who haven’t had their crimes cleared up. In two of the cases the victims have even done their own work identifying the criminals. However the police haven’t pursued prosecutions in either case, despite having clear evidence.
Why is there such a low clear up rate for crimes in the UK?
It isn’t due to rising crime rates overall. Most crimes have decreased over the last few decades according to the Crime Survey of England and Wales. Despite the low prosecution rates, burglary is falling, for example.
However, two crimes in particular have increased: cybercrime and sexual related violence, mainly against women.
Both of these crimes are very difficult to get prosecutions for, which goes some way to explain the very low clear up rates for crime.
Cyber crime has increased dramatically in recent years, and is very difficult to solve because the perpetrators are often unknown, and quite possibly based abroad in the case of organised cybercrime.
Sexual violence has seen an increase in reporting but it can be difficult to get prosecutions and victims are unwilling to to pursue the peretators in the courts because of fear of retribution, shame, and the historically low chances of getting a successful prosecution
A second reason for the low clear up rates for crime is that the police are overstretched and increasingly inexperienced. Tory cuts to police funding saw 20 000 police officers leave the force after 2010. These have now been replaced but with younger and less experienced officers.
And this now less experienced cohort of officers have to deal with increasingly complex crimes compared to a decade ago. This means more time is being spent on cyber crime, sex crimes, but not only that, more police time is being spent on dealing with global crimes too.
This means that crimes such as burglary have been pushed to the back of the priority list. The police today are under increased pressure given their numbers and lack of experience.
Public confidence in the police in the UK is at an all-time low.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This is very relevant to left-realist criminology which argues victims should be put first when it comes to policing strategies. This evidence suggests such an approach is not working and victims are being let down. With such very low clear up rates, public trust in the police is at an all time low, and left-realist approaches rely on the public trusting and working with the police.
It also shows us how the police are struggling to cope with the changing nature of crime.
It is also possibly evidence of how neither left nor right realist approaches to tackling crime control are relevant today. Crime is increasingly global and complex and maybe new and innovative crime control measures are required.
Knife Crime statistics have remained stubbornly high over the last few years, and this is in spite of ongoing campaigns to reduce it.
One such organisation which campaigns to reduce Knife Crime is the Ben Kinsella Trust, named after a teenage victim of Knife Crime from 2008.
The charity has produced numerous teaching resources aimed at key stage four students focussing on the laws surrounding carrying knives and the consequences of carrying them.
Unsurprisingly it has a very victim centred focus, featuring lots of videos with victims of knife crime.
Relevance to A-level Sociology
This is obvious relevance to the Crime and Deviance module and I see two uses to teachers – firstly, some of the resources can be downloaded and adapted, there’s lots relevant to the topic of victimology especially.
Secondly you could get students to analyse the work of the trust itself – getting them to consider how effective such campaigns are, and why they exist.
It does seem somewhat unfortunate that it’s left to the relations of a murdered teenager to spend the rest of their days campaigning to reduce knife-crime, after all.
One would hope that either progressive social change would reduce such incidents OR the police would have sufficient funding to tackle knife crime and at least hold it level (rather than seeing it increasing like it has done recently), but neither of these seem to have been the case, hence why we have a need (a function, in functionalist terms) for charities such as the Ben Kinsella Trust.
It’s a tough one this – a charity doing very positive work, but honestly I’d rather there were no need for it in the first place!
Gangs in the UK are increasingly ‘recruiting’ very young girls, as young as 10, to hold and run drugs and weapons for them and, for the even more unfortunate, to use as sex-slaves.
It seems that girls are very much the victims within gangs, as they have very little chance of moving up the gang hierarchy. They may well make it to the status of ‘youngers’ but it seems that’s where their progression stops – the best they can hope for is to be in the front line running drugs and weapons and recruiting more girls into sexual exploitation.
They have almost no chance of becoming elders, the people who run local gang cells.
If you want a thoroughly depressing watch, then Hidden Girls on BBC3 (available on iplayer) is for you.
The documentary focusses on two female victims of gang exploitation, exploring how they got involved with the gangs, what gang life was like and how they got out of the cylce of exploitation.
The main method used is semi-structured interviews with the two victims, and also some other professionals who work in the field.
Both victims had very unstable home backgrounds from a young age – one talks of how she experienced her mother (not herself) being abused constantly by her father, and when that relationship ended her mother eventually ended up with a new partner who was a gang member and her house became a base for drug dealing, she was roped into the gang that way, eventually ending up holding drugs and weapons for the gang, from when she was 12.
She doesn’t recount too much about her life as a gang member, but she ended up in what she thought was a ‘loving relationship’ as a teenager with a gang member in their 20s, and I dread to think what kind of abuse she suffered, although this isn’t talked about explicitly.
She went through years of self-harming but eventually managed to get out through finding a place in a ‘safe-house’ with a key worker to support her.
The other victim talks about how she was (basically) neglected at home with there frequently being no food or other amenities – washing her hair with cold water and fairy liquid was normal.
She ended up hanging around with a gang, from the age of 11, because she enjoyed the banter and jokes, getting giving stuff for free, and eventually being asked to hold weapons and drugs.
It sounds like she avoided sexual exploitation herself, but only because she had an older girl friend in the gang who advised her that if she wanted to avoid the dreaded ‘line-up’ ritual (where several male gang members have sex with one girl at once) she had to bring in other young girls and persuade them to be the sex-slaves.
She now regrets all the victims she created and runs Out of the Shadows – an organisation aimed to help young people out of a life of crime.
The documentary also talks about how social media is facilitating the sexual exploitation of young girls, although the links to gangs in relation to social media aren’t really explored.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This post has primarily been written for students of A-level sociology and this material on female victims in gangs is mainly relevant to the Crime and Deviance topic.
More specifically it is relevant to the topic of gender and crime – it is support for the view that female criminals (because these victims are also criminals) usually come from a background of abuse and neglect at home.
It also reminds us just how much gangs are a male phenomenon, with females being victims within the gang structure.
So there is obvious relevance to the topic of victimology here too, these are good examples of hidden victims.
This topic is also worth exploring for research methods – according to the woman who set up Out of the Shadows it is very difficult to access these female victims while they are victims – they tend to keep quiet about their exploitation and suffer in silence, so methodologically this means there is no reliable data on the extent of female victimisation in gangs and it might only be possible to explore this from a historical point of view, once they are out.
Needless to say this is also a sensitive topic, so an interesting one from an ethics point of view.
Students of A-level sociology are required to study Victimology as part of the Crime and Deviance compulsory module, which means examiners can legitimately ask them this question!
What are the impacts of crime on Victims?
Victim Support notes the following ways in which crime can affect victims in the short and long term:
Feeling upset or angry (strong emotional reactions)
A victim may feel as if they have lost control of their life, things may spiral downwards (this kind of links to Anomie)
Victims may blame themselves.
Victims may develop physical symptoms linked to the stress of being a victim
Victims may develop longer term anxiety related disorders.
The site notes that the way an individual responds to a crime will depend on a number of variables such as the type of crime, whether they know the victim, the support they get from friends and family and their past experiences of crime.
NB – If you’ve been a Victim of Crime, Victim Support UK is a safe space to go get support and advice.
Personal Stories may be the best way to understand the impact on Victims….
The Cumbria police have put together a video series in which one Domestic Violence Survivor talks through how she got out of an abusive relationship…
Impacts on Victims’ families
NB – it’s not necessarily just the victim who is affected, all of the above can have negative affects on relationships and children if one member of a family is the victim of crime.
One of the most heart breaking crimes where this is felt in the UK is among the families of victims of knife crime, as outlined in this article here.
Secondary Victimisation
Secondary victimisation is when victims relive the trauma of their crime, which may occur when they are cross-examined by the prosecution team in court, or through harassment by agents of the media.
It is most commonly associated with Feminist perspectives on Crime and Deviance – historically victims of rape have also been subject to secondary victimisation when they are ‘put on trial’ by being accused of lying ny the prosecution, for example.
This report from the BBC provides stories from Victims who say they have been ‘re-traumatised by the system’.
Help for Victims of Crime
The Ministry of Justice is another place Victims can go to in order to find out more about whether they are actually victims of crime, and to seek further support as necessary.
Citizens Advice is another place offering advice about getting legal support as a victim of crime.
AQA A level sociology revision resources | Revisesociology.com
This topic is an important part of the Victimology topic, which students of A-level sociology will study as part of the Crime and Deviance option in their second year of study.
The Economic and Social Costs of Crime in England and Wales
The Home Office produces an annual report on the Economic and Social Impacts of Crime, summarising the impacts of crime in England and Wales. The latest report was published in 2018, reflecting on the cost of crime in 2015-16.
The report notes the following costs:
The overall cost to individuals for 2015-16 was £50 billion.
The overall cost to businesses was £9 billion
Violent crime accounts for 75% of the total costs of crime to individuals, but only one third of crimes are violent crimes.
Homicide (murder) is the crime with the greatest overall cost, at just over £ 3 million per incident
Rape (to put it bluntly, but this is the words of the Home Office, has the highest ‘unit cost’ for non-fatal crimes – at just under £40 000 per incident.
TBH this is one of more bizarre tables I’ve seen…
How the Cost of Crime is Calculated
The Home Office includes all of the following when working out costs:
Value of property lost or damaged
Physical and emotional damage to the individual
Lost output as a result of being a victim
Health costs
Policing and Criminal Justice costs (which will include prison)
Costs of preventing crime (such as security measures).
So if we take into account all of the above, we can see why murder has such as high unit cost – all that lost output from the victim and the cost of keeping the murderer in jail for over a decade (most murders are caught).
Limitations with this data
There are limitations with measuring some of the costs of security – the Home Office uses the revenue of cyber security companies to calculate this for example, but I guess it doesn’t take into account specialists companies have to take on to install and maintain cyber security operations.
It might take into account emotional costs – but what about the costs of ‘fear of crime’ – which the media makes sure doesn’t correspond to the actual risks of crime, which could be creating more anxiety disorders which in turn is linked to a reduction in economic output?
Finally, some of this sounds a bit harsh, such as putting a financial figure on the cost of being a victim of rape, it somehow doesn’t quite get to the ‘real’ cost, maybe?!?
How do patterns of Victimisation vary by social class, gender, ethnicity and age?
Are some people more likely to be victims of crime than others? And how do the characteristics of victims vary by different types of crime?
This post has been written for students of A-level sociology studying the crime and deviance module, it is an introduction to the topic of victimisation, which is explicitly on the AQA’s specification.
NB some of the latest up to date information in this post may well contradict the very probably dated information in your sociology text books!
The statistics below focus mainly on the victims of crime in the United Kingdom?
Characteristics of victims of any crime by ethnicity, social class and age (TCSEW)
The Telephone Crime Survey of England and Wales is based on a telephone survey of 30 000 respondents, making it the largest sample which addresses the question of who the victims of crime are.
(NB it’s currently a telephone survey because of Covid-19 restrictions, before that it was a face to face interview survey, to which it may return at some point!)
The TCSEW reports the following variations in patterns of victimisation for the year ending March 2020:
People of mixed ethnicity were more likely to have been victims of crime than other ethnic groups
20% of people from mixed ethnic backgrounds reported being victims, but the victimisation rates were very similar across all other ethnic groups (varying from 14-17%)
Gender seems to have very little affected on reported levels of victimisation
There were very similar reporting levels for both males and females in all ethnic groups.
The chart below demonstrates the remarkably similar patterns in victimisation by both ethnicity and gender (the only ‘significant’ difference being the higher reported rates for mixed ethnicity).
Younger people are more likely to victims of crime than older people
The chart below shows percentage of people reporting having been a victim of crime by age group – you’ll notice it generally declines as people get older, and there is a marked difference if you compare the 55s and overs with youngest three categories:
There is no obvious correlation between social class background and being a victim of crime.
In fact the picture is complex – there is no variation by class for white people, for black people, the unemployed report much lower levels of victimisation compared to professionals and for Asian people there is a slightly lower chance of being a victim the higher your social class background!
Repeat Victimisation
Data from the 2018 CSEW shows that 74% of victims of violent crime were victims once, whereas 26% were victims twice or more (7% three times or more) in the previous year.
Limitations with victimisation data from the TCSEW
These data look at ALL crimes, and the most common types of crime (which have INCREASED MASSIVELY in recent years) are fraud and computer misuse – which are quite likely to be ‘gender/ class/ ethnicity neutral’.
and it may be the case that for more serious crimes there are still significant variations by class/ gender and ethnicity – such as violent crimes including domestic violence and hate crimes.
These data may be invalid because the reporting rates might vary by social class, gender, age and ethnicity – a recent report on the victims of violent crime (see section below) for example found that children were twice as likely to NOT report a crime compared to adults. Also where being a victims of Domestic Violence is concerned, with women more likely to be victims than men, this isn’t the kind of thing you can easily report over the phone, during Lockdown.
And let’s not forget the crimes the TSCEW doesn’t cover victims of State Crime.
Who are The Victims of Violent Crime?
It’s worth looking at who the victims of violent crime are as the impacts are likely to be felt more severely than other types of crime, such being a victim or fraud or burglary.
Extremely low numbers of people are victims of violent crime each year. The report estimates that 2-3% of adults are victims of violence each year, and only 1 in 250 require some kind of medical treatment for their injuries.
Males were at greater risk of violence – both for adults and children
Younger people were more at risk than older people
People from deprived areas were were more likely to be victims – adults from the 10% most deprived areas were almost twice as likely to be victims of violent crime compared to adults from the 10% most affluent areas.
ethnic minorities in general were less likely to be victims of violent crime
The report states that 36% of violence experienced by adults, and 70% by children does not come to the attention of police or a medical professional
Who are the Victims of Domestic Abuse?
One type of violent, interpersonal crime probably not covered in a representative way in the above research is Domestic Abuse, because of its very low reporting rates.
Safe Lives reports the following patterns of victimisation for this type of crime:
90% of victims are women, only 10% are men.
Women from low income households (less than £10 000) were 3.5 times more likely to be victims compared to women from households earning more than £20 000.
The majority of victims are in their 20s and 30s, so as with crime in general, young people are more likely to be victims of domestic abuse than older people.
NB the above stats are based on people seeking help and advice about domestic abuse, so many of these won’t show up on the TCSEW.
If these domestic abuse stats are valid, then women are actually at greater risk of violent crime overall than men. Safe Lives reports that 100 000 women are currently at risk of severe violence at home. (This assumes there isn’t just as many male victims of any violent crime NOT coming forward and reporting their victimisation!).
REPEAT VICTIMISATION is also a horrible feature of Domestic Abuse – SafeLives reports that the average victim is a victim of abuse 50 times over, something which you generally don’t find to anywhere near this extent with being a victim of other types of crime.
Who are Victims of Hate Crime?
Hate crimes recorded by the police have been increasing in recent years according to a recent Home Office Briefing (from 2020).
The vast majority of hate crimes are due to someone’s ethnic background (so basically racist abuse) followed by religion, and around 50% of religiously motivated hate crimes are against Muslims. Anti-semitic crimes have also been increasing steadily.
Crimes against LGBT and Trans people are also higher than you might think – the report notes (based on data from a 2017 survey) that 54% of Trans people have reported experiencing a negative incident outside their home, as have 40% of LGBT people).
The vast majority of victims said they did not report the hate crime against them.
46 million Victims of UK State Crime?
And counting….
At time of writing 46 million people have received at least one dose of one of the Covid-19 vaccinations. The live count is here.
It is possible to interpret these people as having been victims of one of the largest ongoing State Crime of modern times.
The UK governments has consistently declared the vaccines to be safe, whereas the simple and objective truth is, that by regular medical-trial standards scientists simply don’t yet have sufficient data to comment on the safety of these vaccines.
The fact that the UK government has not been clear about this means that they have misled the British public into taking part in a country-level medical trial without their full and informed consent.
This is in breach of people’s human rights as UN conventions clearly state that citizens have a right to not take part in medical trials.
Now it’s a stretch to make the case for this being a State Crime, as people have the choice to not get vaccinated, but there is pressure there – and the government is a leading voice in this, which could be interpreted as coercion, which opens up the door to defining this scenario as a state crime with 46 million victims and counting.
This topic came up as the 6 mark question in the 2019 AQA A-Level Crime and Deviance Paper.
More precisely the question was ‘outline three reasons why victims may not report crimes’
This strikes me as a very easy question, as all you need to do is identify three reasons and then state why. To my mind, this would have been much better as a 10 marker, in which students have to demonstrate more analytical skills by discussing reasons in much more depth. It would surprise me in fact if this comes up as the 2020 10 mark question!
A few ideas on why some victims do not report crimes to the police.
NB – Written in a verbose exam style – you could get away with writing less and still get max marks on the above question!
The first reason is that people may not be aware that they have been a victim of a crime – young children may not have the mental capacity to be aware that they are victims of abuse, or they may have been socialised into thinking abuse is normal.
A second reason is that victims may be fearful of the negative physical or emotional consequences for them if they reported the crime. They may be afraid the perpetrator would find out and punish them for dobbing them into the police, or they may not want the sense of shame that comes with admitting to having been a victim, or not want to relive painful memories.
A third reason is that the victim may have been badly treated by the police in the past or perceive the police as the enemy- young black men are more likely to be stopped and searched and thus may have the impression that the police are institutionally racist, and thus think their racism might lead them to not take them seriously if they reported a crime – the victim might think that if they are racist, the they wouldn’t bother trying to track down someone who harmed a black person.
Victimology for A-Level sociology students studying the crime and deviance option
Victimology is the study of who the victims of crime are, why they are victims, and what we can do about this.
Victimology is a relatively recent edition to the A-level sociology Crime and Deviance specification, and is mainly addressed through applying the sociological perspectives.
Patterns of Victimisation
The (Telephone) Crime Survey of England and Wales
The largest Victim Survey in England and Wales is the (Telephone) Crime Survey of England and Wales. The survey used to be face to face but has been conducted by phone since the outbreak of Covid-19, and samples about 38 000 Households a year.
TCSEW crime shows a year-on-year fall in the number of victims of crime for the last 20 years, except for Cyber Crime and Fraud. If we include the later two types of crime (which have only been recorded by the survey for a few years, then the overall crime rate has been increasing for the last few years.
The risk of being a victim of crime varies by social groups and by type of crime. Below is a summary,
Social Class – people from deprived areas are more likely to be victims of violent crime.
Age – Younger people are more at risk of victimisation than older people, for crime in general.
Ethnicity – minority ethnic groups are at greater risk than whites of being victims of hate crime.
Gender – Males are at greater risk of being victims of violent attacks, about 70% of homicide victims are male. However, women are more likely to victims of domestic violence than me, sexual violence, people trafficking and rape as a weapon of war. Trans people are more likely to be victims of hate crime.
Repeat Victimisation – There are a few people who are unfortunate enough to be a victim of crime many times over. According to the Crime Survey of England and Wales, a mere 4% of people are victims of 44% of all crimes in any one year. In contrast, 60% of people experience no crime in any given year.
For a more detailed look at how patterns of victimisation vary by class, gender, age and ethnicity please see this post – Who Are the Victims of Crime?
Sociological Perspectives applied to Victimology
The remainder of this post simplifies approaches to this topic by distinguishing between Positivist and Critical Victimology….
Positivist Victimology
Mier’s (1989) defines Positivist victimology as having three main features:
It aims to identify the factors that produce the above patterns in victimisation
It focuses on interpersonal crimes of violence
It aims to identify how victims have contributed to their own victimisation.
Earlier Positivist studies focussed on the idea of ‘victim proneness’, seeking to identify the social and psychological characteristics of victims that make them different from and more vulnerable than non-victims. For example, Von Hentig (1948) identified 13 characteristics of victims, such as that they are more likely to females, elderly and ‘mentally subnormal’. The implication is that the victims in some sense ‘invite’ victimisation because of who they are.
An example of positivist victimology is Marvin Wolfgang’s (1958) study of 588 homicides in Philadelphia. He found that 26% involved victim precipitation – the victim triggered the events leading to the homicide, for instance, being the first to use violence.
Evaluations of Positivist Victimology
It is easy to tip over into ‘victim blaming’.
Positivism tends to focus on ‘traditional crime’s – it doesn’t look at green crime and corporate crime for example.
It ignores wider structural factors such as poverty and powerlessness which make some people more likely to be victims than others.
Critical Victimology
Critical victimology is based on conflict theories such as Marxism and Feminism. From a critical point of view the powerless are most likely to be victimised and yet the least likely to have this acknowledged by the state (this is known as the ‘hierarchy of victimisation’).
Victims of the Grenfell Tower Fire, June 2017.
Critical Criminology focuses on two elements: the role of structural factors in explaining patterns of victimisation and power of the state to deny certain victims victim status.
Structural factors are important in explaining why some people are more likely to be victims of crime than others. Factors such as poverty and patriarchy make some people more likely to victims of crime than others.
Structural factors are important, because from a Marxist perspective because poverty and inequality breed crime and thus living in a poor area means that you are more likely to be both a criminal and a victim of crime while Feminists emphasise that the structure of Patriarchy perpetuates crimes against women such as sex-trafficking and domestic violence, meaning that women are far more likely to be victims of sex-crimes than men.
At another level, global power structures mean that many people are the victims of harms done by Western Corporations and State Crimes carried out by Western World Governments (Bhopal and the Drone Wars are two good examples) and yet victims in faraway places are highly unlikely to see justice.
Criminologists who focus on ethnicity and crime would also suggest that Structural Racism means it more likely that ethnic minorities are going to face not only racial crime from the general public, but also discrimination at the hands of the police. Refer to the ethnicity and crime material for more details!
To overcome this, critical criminologists suggest that criminologists should focus on ‘Zemiology’ (the study of harm) rather than the study of crime, to pick up on the true nature and extent of victimisation in the world today.
The state’s power to apply or deny the label of victim can distort the actual extent of victimisation. From a critical criminological perspective, the state often sides with the powerful, and does not define their exploitative and harmful acts as crimes. Tombs and Whyte (2007) for example showed that employers’ violations of health and safety law which lead to thousands of deaths of workers in the UK each year are typically explained away as industrial accidents, thus leaving no one to blame and leaving the injured and dead workers as non-victims.
From a Feminist point of view sexism within the CJS means that most women who are victims of DV and rape fail to come forward, and those who are do are often treated as the guilty party themselves in court, and so are often denied formal victim status and justice.
Tombs and White note that there is an ideological function of this ‘failure to label’ or ‘de- labelling’ – by concealing the true extent of victimisation and its real causes, it hides the crimes of the powerful and denies the victims any justice.
Evaluations of Critical Victimology
It disregards the role victims may play in bringing crime on themselves (e.g. not making their home secure).
Realists argue that it isn’t the job of criminologists to criticise governments and the police, this isn’t the most effective way to reduce crime and thus help victims of ‘ordinary crimes’ such as street violence and burglary.
Sources:
A combination of the main A-level text books were used to write this post.
