Repeat Victimisation and Fear of Crime (UGC-NET Unit X)

Victimisation risk does not spread evenly across a population. A subset of victims is hit more than once, a pattern called repeat victimisation, and risk also spreads outward from an incident to nearby targets, called near-repeat victimisation, such as the houses either side of a burgled property facing raised risk in the days that follow.

Both patterns matter for policing and crime prevention, since resources aimed at the highest-risk targets and their immediate neighbours are more efficient than resources spread thinly across an entire area.

Two explanations are usually taught side by side for why repeat victimisation happens, and NET questions can test either one or the contrast between them. Risk heterogeneity says some targets were always going to be hit repeatedly because of a fixed feature of the target itself, such as an easy entry point, a predictable routine or a location on an offender's regular path.

State dependence says the first offence changes the target's risk going forward, for instance because the offender now knows what is inside a property, how the household is guarded, or that the target did not resist or report. Most treatments present the two as complementary rather than as rival, mutually exclusive accounts, since a target can carry a fixed vulnerability and also become a more attractive repeat target once an offender has learned something from the first incident.

Lifestyle exposure theory starts from the individual and asks why some people face higher victimisation risk than others. Its answer runs through a chain: demographic position (age, sex, income) shapes structural constraints and role expectations, which shape the daily adaptations a person makes, which aggregate into a lifestyle, which sets the associations and unsupervised exposure that finally determine risk. Age and sex do not cause victimisation directly on this account; they matter only because they are strongly correlated with routine daily activity.

Routine activity theory starts from the situation instead of the individual, and asks what has to be true for a crime to become possible at all: a motivated offender, a suitable target and the absence of a capable guardian converging in the same place and time.

The two theories are taught together in the same syllabus bullet because they converge on the same practical variable, unsupervised time spent in places and among people that increase contact with potential offenders, even though one is a victimisation theory and the other is a crime-opportunity theory. Fuller treatment of both, including how they are blended in applied victimology and how the framework explains the victim-offender overlap, is in Lifestyle Exposure, Fear of Crime and Punitiveness.

National crime surveys repeatedly find that older adults and women report higher fear of crime than young men, even though young men carry the highest recorded victimisation risk for most violent and property offences. This mismatch is called the fear-of-crime paradox, and it holds up across different countries and different survey instruments, which rules out a one-off measurement quirk as the explanation.

Three explanations are commonly offered for the paradox, and are best understood as operating together rather than as competitors. The vulnerability account says the same incident causes worse harm and slower recovery for someone physically or financially vulnerable, which rationally raises fear even where incidence is equal or lower. The shadow hypothesis says a general fear-of-crime question implicitly captures a woman's more specific fear of sexual assault, a risk that ordinary assault or robbery statistics understate.

A third account points to the local environment: perceived neighbourhood disorder and media coverage of rare, severe offences can raise fear independently of the area's actual recorded crime rate. Fear of crime and objective risk should therefore be treated as two separately measured quantities, not as one construct seen from two angles.

The syllabus bullet also names punitivity, meaning public support for harsher sentencing and tougher criminal justice responses generally. A common assumption is that being victimised, or being more afraid of crime, straightforwardly makes a person more punitive. The evidence does not support a simple rule: direct victims are not uniformly more punitive than non-victims, and some studies find lower punitiveness among victims who felt the justice system responded well to their case.

What predicts punitiveness more consistently is high fear combined with low confidence that the criminal justice system is working, which suggests institutional confidence is doing more of the work than fear or victim status alone.

For policy, this means a spike in survey-measured fear after one high-profile but statistically rare offence is a weak basis for a general sentencing change, since it reflects media salience rather than a shift in underlying risk, while a sustained decline in confidence that offenders are caught points at something institutions can actually address.