Lifestyle Exposure Theory
Definition
The theory, set out by Michael Hindelang, Michael Gottfredson and James Garofalo in 1978, that a person's routine daily activities and associations determine how much time they spend exposed to potential offenders, which in turn sets their baseline risk of victimisation.
Related terms
- Fear-of-Crime Paradox
- The consistent survey finding that older adults and women report higher fear of crime than young men, despite young men carrying the...
- Punitiveness
- Public support for harsher sentencing and tougher criminal justice responses generally, which tracks confidence in institutions more consistently than it tracks fear...
- Near-Repeat Victimisation
- Elevated risk to targets located close in space and time to an initial incident, such as a neighbouring house shortly after a...
- Repeat Victimisation
- The empirical pattern in which a small proportion of people or locations experience a disproportionate share of violent incidents. Domestic violence shows...
- Risk Heterogeneity
- An explanation for repeat victimisation holding that some targets always carried higher risk because of a fixed feature, such as a vulnerable...
- Routine Activity Theory
- A criminological framework developed by Cohen and Felson (1979) that explains property crime as the product of three converging elements: a motivated...
- Shadow Hypothesis
- Kenneth Ferraro's proposal that women's general fear of crime functions partly as a proxy for a more specific fear of sexual assault,...
- State Dependence
- An explanation for repeat victimisation holding that being victimised itself raises the risk of being victimised again, for example because the offender...
- Structural Constraints
- In lifestyle exposure theory, the demographic and role-based limits, such as age, sex, income and family status, that shape which lifestyles are...
- Victim-Offender Overlap
- The empirical finding that the same demographic groups, and often the same individuals, show up disproportionately as both victims and offenders, because...
Explained in these topics
- Lifestyle Exposure, Fear of Crime and Punitiveness
- Repeat Victimisation and Fear of Crime (UGC-NET Unit X)The theory that demographic differences in victimisation risk are explained by the routine lifestyles typically associated with age and sex, not by those trait...