Forensics - Defining and Measuring Crime Flashcards
Define crime
An illegal act which is punishable by incarceration or another type of punishment, after consideration by a judge and jury in a legal trial.
What are the historical issues related to defining crime?
Historical issues show that what was considered a crime at one point in history, may not be considered a crime according to modern standards e.g homosexuality only being legalised in the UK in 1967, through the Sexual Offences Act of 1967
What are the cultural issues related to defining crime?
Similarly to historical issues, cultural issues face the same problem. For example, smacking a child in one culture may be seen as acceptable or even encouraged as a form of ‘tough love’ , whereas this is not the case in the UK - smacking a child so that a mark is left is now punishable by law, according to the 2004 Child’s Protection Act.
What are the 3 main methods of measuring crime?
Official Statistics, Victim Surveys and Offender Surveys.
What do Official statistics describe?
OS describe the number of crimes reported to and recorded by the police which have been processed and published by the Home Office on an annual basis.
What do victim surveys involve?
Victim surveys involve 50,000 randomly selected households to self-report the number and types of crimes which have been committed against them during the past year. It is then published annually by the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
What do offender surveys target?
A randomly-selected cohort of criminals
What do offender surveys provide details of?
The criminals give details of the types and frequency of crimes they have committed across a set time period e.g during the last year as recorded by The Offender Crime and Justice Survey.
Who are offender surveys particularly useful for? Why?
Governmental organisations as it gives them a view of the patterns and risk factors for crime at a national scale. The results from the surveys can be used to inform crime prevention/management strategies.
What are the limitations of the methods used to measure crime?
- A particular issue related to official statistics is its susceptibility to concealing the ‘dark figure’ of crime. I.e where 75% of crime goes unreported. This may be due to a lack of standardisation of police recording policies in relation to crime , as well as the victim fearing revenge or feeling untrustworthy of the police.
- Victim surveys suffer from the serious methodological problems associated with self report techniques and specifically , the idea of ‘telescoping’ where the victim may mistakenly believe that a crime had been committed against them significantly more recently that it actually had been due to the trauma and distress associated with it.
- The data collected from Offender surveys may be distorted or biased because it has been collected from offenders. They may want to over-exaggerate their crimes to give themselves a feeling of accomplishment and grandeur, or under-exaggerate their crimes to diminish responsibility. This means that too much reliance cannot be placed upon the honesty and integrity of offenders in self-report measures.
What are the strengths of defining crime?
+ Victim surveys have the advantage over official statistics, the ‘dark figure’ of crime is less likely to be concealed due to the self-report technique, where individuals may feel that there are less repercussions for their actions.
+ Offender surveys have been particularly useful in informing crime prevention and management strategies due to showing the patterns and risk factors of offending behaviour. Therefore, this demonstrates a real-life practical application.
