Crime Victimization in Comparative Perspective: Results from the International Crime Victims Survey,1989-2000

Most studies on crime deal with a single nation, but this study reports on the situation in over 60 countries all across the globe from a comparative perspective. The book's 25 chapters by leading scholars in this research area describe differences in criminal victimization between individuals in various countries across the world. They present in-depth discussions of the current criminological theories explaining these differences. Moreover, the authors test the empirical tenability of these explanations by analysing data from the International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS). The ICVS is the most far-reaching program of fully standardized sample surveys examining householders' crime experiences in various countries. Surveys were conducted in 1989, 1992, 1996 and 2000. At the moment, the ICVS includes data on more than 200,000 respondents in over 60 countries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, North and South America, Asia, Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The authors focus on various topics related to crime victimization. The victimization risks of various types of crime - e.g. property crime, violent crime, domestic violence, corruption - and their correlations are discussed. Special attention is devoted to gender differences in crime victimization, and various responses to crime, e.g. reporting to the police, risk perception and fear of crime, are examined.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgements About the Authors 1. Introduction Part 1: Crime Victimization 2. Criminal victimization in seventeen industrialized countries 3. Crime trends in thirteen industrialized countries 4. Criminal victimization in Eastern-Central Europe 5. Crime in the Baltic States 6. Crime victimization in Southern Africa 7. Criminal victimization in Latin America Part 2: Crime Victimization and its Correlates 8. Variations in cross-national victimization 9. Burglary victimization across Europe 10. Corruption in industrialized and developing countries 11. Intercorrelations of crime 12. An empirical test of the life-course perspective to victimization 13. Cross-national perspective of violent victimization risk Part 3: Gender and Crime Victimization 14. Violence against women and victimization situations 15. Victimization of domestic and sexual violence in Western Europe 16. Gender inequality, sexual violence, and fear in Europe Part 4: Fear of Crime 17. Fear of crime and victimization in Western industrialized countries 18. Victimization experience and the fear of crime 19. Fear of crime and victimization 20. Experiencing safety Part 5: Reactions to Crime 21. Who's armed and why 22. Potentials and pitfalls of aggregated data in comarative victimology 23. Attitudes towards sentencing in nine industrialized countries Part 6: Methods 24. Comparing the international crime victims survey with crime victimization surveys in the United States 25. Effects of design differences on rate comparisons in the ICVS