Crime and Context:The Impact of Individual, Neighborhood, City and Country Characteristics on Victimization

This book deals with the distribution of criminal victimization across social groups and spatial areas. Why do certain kinds of people run higher risk of victimization than others? Why do spatial units, such as neighborhoods, cities and countries, differ in their rates of victimization? The present study shows that an individual’s risk of becoming the victim of a crime is not only determined by personal characteristics, but also depends on the type of neighborhood, city and even the country where the individual lives. Integrating insights from three criminological theories strain/anomie theory (Merton 1957), routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson 1979) and social disorganization theory (Shaw & McKay 1942), this study argues that crime rates will be higher the more motivated offenders, suitable targets and the absence of local guardians converge in time and space. Using multilevel methods of analysis, hypotheses deduced from these insights were simultaneously tested in explanatory models of crime victimization. High risks and rates of victimization were therefore expected, and indeed found, in countries with high income inequality, cities with low levels of police efficacy, and neighborhoods with high levels of residential mobility and ethnic heterogeneity. Furthermore, at the individual level, higher risks were found for youngsters, affluent households and people performing many non-domestic activities. These findings are in accordance with previous ecological and multilevel studies on victimization. New insights were derived from multilevel analyses that examined the impact of socioeconomic neighborhood change on victimization risk. From Dutch victimization data, it appeared that the chance to become the victim of theft, violence or vandalism was not only high in disadvantaged neighborhoods, but also in neighborhoods that were improving between 1994 and 1998. These gentrifying neighborhoods are characterized by a strong influx of new residents, which possibly results in a low potential for collective social control. This finding suggests that the gentrification of disadvantaged neighborhoods may not have the intended consequences within a short term. Furthermore, controlling for additional crime-inducing characteristics, prevention efforts of citizens to control risks of burglary victimization were found to exert varying effects at different levels of observation. For individual households, prevention measures reduce burglary victimization risk, while, simultaneously, high city levels of prevention measures increase risk. Previous research on crime displacement has suggested that criminals stay close to the original target when they move to different geographic areas in response to situational crime prevention. The findings in the present research are however more in line with Brantingham and Brantingham’s (1993) pattern theory, which suggest that criminals will commit crimes in the area they are acquainted with through routine activities. Likewise, burglars may displace their actions within this ‘awareness space’. Sometimes, this is close to the original target, while at other times burglars may search alternative targets further away within their awareness space. As a consequence, the prevention efforts of households across the crime target’s city of residence are important to understand differentiation in victimization