2012_Preventing_repeat_victimization2.pdf (3.32 MB)
Preventing repeat victimization: a systematic review
book
posted on 2014-10-23, 15:31 authored by Louise Nicholas, Graham Farrell, David P. Farrington, Shane D. JohnsonIn any given year, most crimes occur against targets that have already
been victimized. The crime prevention strategy deriving from
this knowledge is that targeting repeat victimization provides a
means of allocating crime prevention resources in an efficient and
informed manner. This report presents the findings of a systematic
review of 31 studies that evaluate efforts to prevent repeat victimization.
Most of the evaluations focus on preventing residential burglary,
but commercial burglary, domestic violence, and sexual victimization
are also covered.
The main conclusion is that the evidence shows that repeat victimization
can be prevented and crime can be reduced. Over all the
evaluations, crimes decreased by one-sixth in the prevention condition
compared with the control condition. The decreases were greatest
(up to one-fifth) for programmes that were designed to prevent
repeat burglaries (residential and commercial). There were fewer
evaluations of programmes designed to prevent repeat sexual victimization,
but these did not seem to be effective in general.
There are indications about what factors increase the success of
prevention efforts. Appropriately tailored and implemented situational
crime prevention measures, such as target hardening and
neighbourhood watch, appear to be the most effective. Advice to
victims, and education of victims, are less effective. They are often
not prevention measures themselves and do not necessarily lead to
the adoption of such measures.
The effectiveness of these crime prevention measures increased as
the degree of implementation increased. There were many problems
of implementation, including poor tailoring of interventions to crime
problems, difficulty of recruiting, training and retaining staff, breakdown
in communications, data problems, and resistance to tactics
by potential recipients or implementers.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Citation
GROVE, L.E. ... et al, 2012. Preventing repeat victimization: a systematic review. Stockholm Sweden: Brottsförebyggande rådet/The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.Publisher
Brottsförebyggande rådet/The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (© Brottsförebyggande rådet)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2012Notes
This book/report was prepared for The Swedish National Council for Crime PreventionISBN
9789186027919ISSN
1100-6676Publisher version
Language
- en