Legal Research

Juristat Study on Multiple Victimization

By Simon Fodden

The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (Juristat), part of the Statistics Canada organization, has released “Multiple Victimization in Canada, 2004″ by Samuel Perreault, Julie Sauvé, and Mike Burns. There’s a version in HTML and in PDF.

As the title suggests, the study looked at data on repeat victimization within the population, both as concerns violent crimes against the person and crimes against property (“household crimes”). In 2004, of all Canadians who reported being victims of violent crime, rather more than a third (38%) reported being victimized multiple times, accounting for almost two thirds (60%) of all violent crimes. Of the group experiencing multiple victimization, half were victimized three or more times.

Some other key findings are as follows:

• “[C]haracteristics such as youth, being single, frequently going out in the evening, Aboriginal status and alcohol consumption are factors associated with a greater risk of victimization.”
• No single factor predicts who will experience multiple victimization. “[T]he risk factors for multiple victimization are the same as for victimization in general. In brief, if a person is at greater risk of being a victim of a crime, that person will, in the same way, be at greater risk of being victimized multiple times.”

  “. . . [T]he best predictor of multiple victimization is being a victim the first time.”

• “People who rented their home, lived in urban areas and resided in neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of single-parent families were more likely to be victims of a property crime more than once.”

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 06, 2010 (boomark / email).