VICTIMISATION

Victimisation is not a random event. Rather it is patterned and predictable.



Victimisation is not a random event. Rather it is patterned and predictable.

Introduction

All crimes are events that occur in space and time (Chapin, 1974; Felson, 1983); all crimes have spatial and temporal elements (Robinson, 1997b). Legal activities of people in space and time "set the stage for spatial and temporal patterns of" illegal activities (Felson, 1983:665). In other words, "crime derives from many of the good aspects of society" (Felson, 1994:21). "Society provides temptations to commit crimes" (Felson, 1994:22, 42), as well as simple opportunities for crimes to successfully occur. Increases in crime may also depend on a lack of "controls to prevent people from following these temptations," which society also provides. Therefore, the type and amount of crime a society has is organised by routine legitimate activities of everyday life. For example, what victims do, and where and when they do it -- helps determine the where and when of crime.

Opportunity theories, most notably routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979), and lifestyle/exposure theory (Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garofalo, 1978), have taught us this lesson. The result has been that criminologists are beginning to seriously examine spatial and temporal elements of individual crime types, housed under the notion of the "place of crime" (Eck and Weisburd, 1995). To increase our understanding of criminality -- i.e., why individuals commit crimes -- we must first direct our efforts at understanding actual criminal events -- i.e., why some places and victims become targets for crime more than others (Weisburd, 1997).

This paper reports findings from an exploratory, place-specific study of the relationship between victims' lifestyles, routine activities, and burglary victimisation. The author discusses the implications of his findings for lifestyle / exposure and routine activities theories. The study strives to encourage the movement in criminology which is shifting our focus away from focusing on offenders and explaining why individuals commit crimes, toward accounting for why crimes happen at particular places at particular times and not others.

Victims And Crime

Historically, criminologists have ignored the role of places and targets in criminal events; focusing instead on offenders (Eck and Weisburd, 1995; Weisburd, 1997). This omission has produced a basic lack of understanding of criminal events (Garofalo, 1987). When criminologists ignore the place and target of crime and focus on the offender, the role that victims play in criminal events is neglected (Fattah, 1993). Logically, no crime can occur without a target (i.e., the victim or the victim's property).

Mostly because of the development and testing of opportunity theories of criminal events such as lifestyle / exposure theory (Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garofalo, 1978) and routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, 1979), criminologists have recently recognised the relationship between the lifestyles of potential victims and criminal events. Criminologists have recognised that whether criminal events occur, as well as where they occur in space and when they occur in time, is partially contingent on where and when routine activities of potential victims occur (Robinson, ...