Ethnic Minorities, Victimisation and Racial Harassment

• NCJ Number: 165260
• Author(s): M FitzGerald; C Hale
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 4 pages
• Corporate Author: Great Britain Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate
• Sale Source: Great Britain Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom
• Note: Home Office Research Findings, No. 39. US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, International Crime Statistics Program.

Annotation

Based on combined data for the 1988 and 1992 British Crime Survey, this report compares the results for various ethnic groups.

Abstract

The findings show that ethnic minorities were more likely to be victims of crimes and serious threats than whites; the main reasons for this were their age structure, their socioeconomic characteristics, and the type of area in which they lived. In general, minority victims in all groups were no less likely than whites to report offenses to the police, and in some cases they were more likely to do so; however, minority victims were much less satisfied with the police response. The proportion of all minority respondents who had been victims of racially motivated incidents in the preceding year was 4 percent for Afro- Caribbeans, 5 percent for Indians, and 8 percent for Pakistanis. Nearly one-third of Pakistani victims said that incidents were racially motivated, and this increased to 70 percent in the case of threats. The average figure for Indians was lower, at just under one-fifth; for Afro-Caribbean victims it was 14 percent. Racially motivated incidents were more likely to be reported to the police by Indians than other types of crime; but both Afro- Caribbeans and Pakistanis were less inclined to report these incidents. Victims were even less satisfied with the police response to the racial incidents they reported than with the police response to other types of crimes and threats. Fear of crime was higher among the Asian groups than among whites, even when allowance was made for other relevant factors. In areas where racial attacks were perceived as a problem, both minority and white respondents tended to have higher levels of fear of crime. The British Crime Survey provides no evidence of the large increase in racial incidents between 1988 and 1992 suggested by police figures, but it shows a large gap between the number of racial incidents reported to the police and the number they recorded over that period. 1 table, 4 figures, and 5 references