Forensic Psychology For Dummies (68 page)

Location:
Inevitably, if you live in or often visit a high-crime area, you’re more likely to get caught up in a crime.

More specifically, here’s a list of attributes, locations and circumstances that increase the likelihood of becoming a victim of crime:

Attractiveness:
Where the target object is so valued that the offender can sell it on to others, for example, an expensive car or the latest mobile phone. Clearly, the items under this category are ever-changing as new desirable objects come onto the market.

You may think that attractiveness can also apply to victims of sexual assaults, but no clear evidence suggests that women who are generally regarded as attractive have a higher probability of being victims of such crimes. Although younger women are more likely to suffer rape than older women, this is just as likely to be a consequence of lifestyle – that is, being out and about, mixing with a variety of people – than any special attractiveness to rapists.

‘Deviant’ place:
Locations where crime can flourish, such as where high numbers of people meet at the same time and place: for example, a lot of crime is committed around football matches.

If the police don’t patrol such places, they can become known as
crime hot spots,
where people are at a higher risk of victimisation.

Proximity:
Where the offender can access the target geographically or by person-to-person interaction.

Criminals select some victims simply because they’re near to where the offender operates. (This fact is the other side of the coin to locating offenders from knowing where the crimes are, something I discuss in Chapter 6.)

Vulnerability:
Where a lack of protection of property, or the reduced ability of a person to resist an attack, increases the risk of being a victim. The elderly, very young or infirm, or those with learning disabilities, may all be more at risk if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the UK, the following groups are more than twice as likely to be burgled than the average household:

Young households

Lone parents

The unemployed

In the UK and US, teenagers and young adults are twice as likely to experience violent crime compared with the rest of the population. In general, as people get older they’re less likely to experience violent crime. For example, a teenager in the US is ten times more likely to experience some sort of assault than a person over 65 years old. In addition, black people in the US are almost twice as likely to experience a violent crime than white people.

Large variations in the prevalence of crimes also exist in different regions of a country, especially property crimes. As is widely known, you’re more likely to become a victim of crime in cities than in the countryside, although the types of crime vary and so you have to be cautious about comparisons. For example, not much cattle rustling takes place in New York or London, and not a lot of fraudulent bankers are roaming the Yorkshire moors or Indiana farmland!

Interestingly, violent crimes tend to have the same frequency per head of population – whether in cities, small towns or rural areas – across the UK, which contradicts the general assumption that violence has a higher rate of incidence in the inner cities. Of course, many more people live in inner cities – and more vulnerable people – than in small towns, and so the actual number of violent crimes is much higher. After all, the London Metropolitan police has to deal with about a quarter of all crimes that occur in the UK, but the population they serve accounts for about a third of the people who live in the UK.