Criminal Victimisation in International Perspective: Key findings from the 2004-2005 ICVS and EU ICS

By Jan van Dijk John van Kesteren Paul Smit.

The International Crime Victims Survey became operational in 1989. The main object was to seek advancement in international comparative criminological research, beyond the constraints of officially recorded crime data. The next sweeps of the ICVS surveys took place in 1992, 1996 and 2000. With its fifth sweep in 2005 the initiative has developed into a truly unique global project. Over a time span of fifteen years more than 300,000 people were interviewed about their experiences with victimisation and related subjects in 78 different countries. This report describes the 2004 – 2005 sweep of surveys in 30 countries and 33 capital or main cities and compares results with those of earlier sweeps. A large portion of the latest data in this report comes from the European Survey on Crime and Safety (EU ICS), organised by a consortium lead by Gallup Europe, co-financed by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Research and Technology Development. The ICVS is the most comprehensive instrument developed yet to monitor and study volume crimes, perception of crime and attitudes towards the criminal justice system in a comparative, international perspective. The data are from surveys amongst the general public and therefore not influenced by political or ideological agendas of governments of individual countries. Standardisation of questionnaires used and other aspects of data collection assure that data can, within confidence margins, be reliably compared across countries. Independent reviews have attested to the comparability of ICVS results (e.g. Lynch, 2006). The ICVS started in 1989 in 14 industrialised countries. City surveys were also piloted in Warsaw, Poland and Surabaya, Indonesia. Already in the second sweep coverage was enlarged by including several countries in Eastern Central Europe. Fieldwork in some of these countries was funded by the Ministry for Development Aid of the Netherlands. For these countries the project played a part in the process of modernising criminal justice systems after Western European models. Many of those countries have now become part of the European Union. Where most industrialised countries have a long tradition of publishing statistics on police-recorded crime, in many developing countries crime data are either fragmented, of poor quality or not available to the public. Crime victim surveys in these countries, although restricted to the capital or main cities, is often the only available source of statistical information on crime and victimisation. Internationally comparable crime victim surveys not only serve policy purposes but make data available that can be used by researchers interested in crime in a comparative context, including in developing countries from different regions of the world.

The Hague: WODC; Boom Juridische uitgevers: 2007. 292p.