NCJ Number
113963
Date Published
1988
Length
11 pages
Annotation
The difficulties involved in quantifying the volume of 'multiple' victimizations and in adequately reflecting the experiences of 'multiple' victims do not justify their exclusion from victimization survey data, neither do they justify denying their experiences of crime by imposing arbitrary upper limits on the number of crimes a respondent may report for a particular time period.
Abstract
Crime surveys typically focus on discrete incidents of victimization; however, violent victimization may often be better conceptualized as a process rather than as a series of discrete events. This is most evident in prolonged and habitual domestic violence. There are also other situations in which violence, abuse, and petty theft are an integral part of victims' daily existence. This phenomenon of 'multiple' victimization presents two problems for victim surveys. One problem is that victims' experiences of crime may be so common, or individual incidents so similar, that respondents cannot recall dates or details of the relevant events to be recorded. A second problem is that if respondents can remember sufficient details of the many crimes they have suffered, their experiences will inflate gross victimization rates and greatly increase estimates of the probable risk of becoming a victim for the population as a whole. This chapter presents a case study of multiple victimization to illustrate the difficulty of reflecting the complexities of multiple victimization by means of survey data. What is needed is a more flexible approach to the design of victim surveys and greater creativity by researchers.