The new edition of CU Boulder Professor Jill Turanovic’s book explains how and why victimization happens, as well as what can be done about it

Understanding why crime happens and how to prevent it depends on taking into account both victims and offenders, including their behaviors and decisions, and the factors that lead to increased vulnerability.

This is one of the themes highlighted in the recently released second edition of Thinking About Victimization by Jillian Turanovic, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of sociology, and University of Cincinnati fellow Travis Pratt. In it, they explore victimization and its study in detail, addressing how victimization is measured, the theories explaining victimization, why crime is committed, how to respond to it and myths about particular types of crime and victimization.

Measuring victimization

One of the most basic issues facing the study of crime and victimization is getting accurate data, Turanovic says. For example, police reports only tell part of the story, because only a fraction of all crimes are reported to police.

To more accurately gauge the true amount of crime happening in society, researchers in the 1960s developed self-report victimization surveys. The prime source of survey data is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

As NCVS data came out, the so-called “dark figure” of crime was revealed: Nearly twice as much crime is committed than is reported by official sources.

“We are able to capture more victimization through self-report surveys than we can capture through official police records—especially for crimes like sexual assault and intimate partner violence,” Turanovic says. Rape and sexual assault are less often reported to the police than any other crime, with just 21.5% of incidents recorded by the NCVS also reported to the police, according to a figure from the book. This speaks to several factors that stop people from reporting crimes: shame, fear of retaliation, and hesitance to involve law enforcement.

Even for less serious crimes, people may hesitate to involve law enforcement, which is why only 26.1% of petty thefts are reported. In many cases, Turanovic explains, filing a police report does not seem worth the effort because of the low value of the stolen goods and the slim chance of their recovery.

Competing theories

Although national crime rates of the late 1960s were not especially high in comparison to those of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Turanovic says, most forms of crime were rapidly increasing during this period. This spurred theoretical development among academics, as criminologists had previously believed that crime would go down as economic conditions improved, as they did in America after World War II. To help explain why the United States could be both rich and crime ridden, criminologists developed two new theoretical frameworks to better understand the phenomenon: lifestyle and routine activity theories.

Lifestyle theory is based on observations of demographic trends—namely, that young men victimize others and are victimized most often. Behavioral differences are one explanation, according to Turanovic, as young males expose themselves to greater risk through their activities, the situations they enter and the people they associate with than either females or older males.

Routine activity theory was established to explain why people are victimized when they aren’t doing risky things. It is based on the idea that as certain routine activities increase over time in society, people’s risk for victimization also increases. For example, it was theorized that women increasingly participating in the labor force could lead to an increase in burglaries because it left more houses empty during the day.

Both theories have limitations, Turanovic says, so both must be applied to answer the fundamental questions of criminology and victimology.

Why do people commit crimes?

“A well-established fact in criminology is that a small proportion of people engage in the majority of crimes,” Turanovic says. Research indicates that more than half of all crimes are committed by less than a tenth of the population. Recognizing the characteristics of these habitual offenders is necessary for preventing crime on both the individual and systemic levels, she says, given that the former entails avoiding dangerous people and the latter involves restraining or rehabilitating them.

So, what do criminals tend to have in common? One answer is a lack of self-control, Turanovic says.

“People with low self-control have a hard time thinking about the long-term consequences of their actions, and they tend to react impulsively in the moment without stopping to think if what they’re doing is the best,” she says, adding that it’s not hard to see how this can lead to crime. For example, most people have wanted something that wasn’t theirs at one point, and the less self-control a person has, the easier it is for common feelings like this to turn into theft or another type of crime.

In keeping with the overlap between victim and victimizer seen in demographic trends, people with low self-control are also victimized more often, according to Turanovic. “It’s not like such individuals are choosing to be victimized,” she explains, but “people with low self-control have a hard time assessing risks around themselves.”

However, Turanovic says, self-control is just one factor: “There’re a lot of other environmental, cultural, and social factors that also play a role in why people are engaging in crime or are disproportionately likely to be victimized.” Low self-control is “typically developed in youth who are subject to dysfunctional home environments,” she says, and it “is also found to be lower in socially disorganized, disadvantaged communities, so it’s important to also take into account those factors.”

How can crimes be prevented?

Considering that people of a certain age are particularly likely to commit crimes, a simple response is to avoid giving them opportunities to offend.

There is another approach to decreasing crime that doesn’t involve avoiding risky people or contexts, however: capable guardianship. This can take the form of anything from security cameras to guards. Essentially, even if someone is in a risky situation, like a mall where people in their peak offending years congregate that is located in a state where the rate of shoplifting is high, establishing defenses against crime can thwart or even prevent it, Turanovic says.

“From a situational crime prevention standpoint, if you assume that a crime is occurring because there are motivated offenders around suitable targets with a lack of capable guardianship, you can increase guardianship and reduce target attractiveness by making crime seem more difficult, more risky, and less rewarding,” she explains. She adds that this is just one example of how the same theoretical framework and evidence base can lead to different conclusions.

Another is the broken windows theory.

“Broken windows theory assumes that if there are visible signs of disorder in a community, it gives a signal to would-be offenders that no one cares, and so it’s acceptable to move into that community to start engaging in crime,” Turanovic says. So, if a building’s windows have been broken and remain so for a while, for example, it may seem that breaking more windows, stealing from the building, or using it for some illicit purpose would be less risky.

Despite recognizing these important criminological facts, broken windows theory has fallen out of favor, along with the aggressive policing of disorder and minor offenses that it inspired. This is partly because of new evidence suggesting that people are not very afraid of small signs of disorder and partly because of negative reactions from affected communities.

“There seem to be a lot of consequences of broken windows policing,” Turanovic explains. “It erodes community trust and clogs the criminal justice process. Finding and arresting people for minor things can ultimately result in more consequences for them, disrupt prosocial aspects of their lives, and even increase their future likelihood of further contact with the criminal justice system,” adding that such practices may also impact community collective efficacy.

“Collective efficacy is essentially this feeling of mutual responsibility to look out for each other and to take care of the community. When that breaks down and there is no real informal social control of youth or willingness to intervene if crime is happening, that’s when crime develops in the community,” Turanovic says.

Myths and misconceptions

Aside from these theoretical and systematic considerations, people need to understand how different crimes typically happen to prevent victimization, Turanovic says, adding that the public’s perception of crime is often distorted by the news and entertainment media’s tendency to focus on particular sorts of incidents. Rape and sexual assault are major examples.

“This crime is most likely to occur between people who know each other, and often both parties are involved in some form of consensual interaction prior to the assault,” Turanovic says. “Especially in the news and on crime shows, we see sexual assault typically depicted as a stranger attacking a woman, maybe in a dark alley alone at night. While that can happen, it does not reflect the majority of these kinds of crimes.”

Popular concepts of school violence have also been biased by the media, she says: “School violence in general hasn’t actually been increasing at the rate that you may expect based on what you see on the news.”

The idea that school violence is completely unique from other forms of violence is another misconception, Turanovic says, noting that “a lot of violence that starts in the community bleeds into the school context.”

Understanding why crime happens

Turanovic emphasizes that “the study of crime is almost exclusively focused on offenders’ behaviors and decisions, and it leaves victims out of the equation a lot of the time. As the victimization literature developed, it became highly focused on the victim, the victim’s behaviors and their risk factors or vulnerability factors, and the offender’s side of things is left out.

“To best prevent crime and understand why crime happens, you have to take into account the behaviors and decisions of both parties, and the factors that lead people to be in risky situations or situations where they’re more vulnerable,” she says. “We can better understand and study the situations and contexts by which victimization happens, and who’s most vulnerable, without engaging in victim blaming. Although broad social and cultural changes may be needed to eliminate crime, there are also things that we can learn or do in our daily lives that make it less likely that we may be targeted. It is important to keep in mind those things as well to best prevent victimization.” 

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