Question

Objective: Demonstrate a working knowledge of repeat victimization and situational explanations.

Repeat victimization is something that is difficult to understand or even believe. The data in this area is simply frightening. What can we do about this major problem in our criminal justice system? Situational explanations such as social strain, stress, dependence, and social isolation are considered to be factors. This is not just a criminal justice issue, but a societal issue. The question is, how do we deal with it in our field?

• Review Chapter 2 in your textbook.
• Write a three page paper about the issues of repeat victimization and situational explanations of crime.
• Identify what it means to be a repeat victim.
• Explain how this information is gathered.
• Discuss how this information can be used.
• Identify the situational explanations of crime and explain them fully:
  • Stein theory
  • Stress

Answer 1

Repeat victimization, or revictimization, occurs when the same type of crime incident is experienced by the same—or virtually the same—victim or target within a specific period of time such as a year. Repeat victimization refers to the total number of offenses experienced by a victim or target including the initial and subsequent offenses. A person's house may be burglarized twice in a year or 10 times, and both examples are considered repeats. The amount of repeat victimization is usually reported as the percentage of victims (persons or addresses) who are victimized more than once during a time period for a specific crime type, such as burglary or robbery. Repeat victimization is also calculated as the proportion of offenses that are suffered by repeat victims; this figure is usually called repeat offenses.

Repeat victimization is substantial and accounts for a large portion of all crime. While revictimization occurs for virtually all crime problems, the precise amount of crime associated with revictimization varies between crime problems, over time, and across places.† These variations reflect the local nature of crime and important differences in the type and amount of data used for computing repeat victimization. Three primary sources of information demonstrate that repeat victimization is prevalent across the world: surveys of victims, interviews with offenders, and crime reports. Although each of these sources has limitations, the prevalence of revictimization is consistent across these different sources.

The Table below shows the estimate percentage of repeated offenses on an international level:-

Offenses	Repeat Offenses
Sexual assault	46%
Assault	41%
Robbery	27%
Vandalism to vehicle	25%
Theft from vehicle	21%
Vehicle theft	20%
Burglary	17%

Comparison data from international victimization surveys show that repeat victimization is more common for violent crime such as assaults and robbery than for property crime

Offense	Repeat Offenses	Repeat Victims	Location
Domestic violence	62% 42%	28% 31%	Merseyside, England West Yorkshire, England
Commercial robbery	65%	32%	Indianapolis, Indiana
Gas station robbery	62%	37%	Australia
Bank robbery	58% 36%		England
Residential burglary	32% 13% 32% 25%	15% 7% 16% 9%	Nottinghamshire, England Merseyside, England Beenleigh, Australia Enschede, Netherlands
Commercial burglary	66% 33%	36% 14%	Austin, Texas Merseyside, England
Residential and commercial burglary	39%	18%	Charlotte, North Carolina

Although many studies of repeat victimization are based on surveys of victims, police records also show strong evidence of revictimization for problems ranging from bank robberies to domestic violence and burglaries. As with the victimization surveys, crime reports show the largest amount of repeat victimization for domestic violence.

Something about the situation is used to explain behaviour. A proper situational explanation of crime requires a well-developed action theory that details how the interaction between kinds of people and kinds of settings triggers particular kinds of acts of crime. For example- A child is aggressive because they have copied other aggressive children.

Explanations of deviance and crime are either situational or dispositional, and that of the two, situational explanations might be the more important. Nonetheless, with a few notable exceptions, for the next four decades sociologists focused on dispositional theories to the near total exclusion of situational variables. However, an increasing awareness of the theoretical limitations of strategies based only on dispositions has begun to encourage researchers to reconsider situational explanations. Most of the research that explicitly examines situational dynamics in producing crime has originated in experimental psychology, symbolic interactionism, or opportunity theories. Experimental research has helped to identify the situational correlates of crime and deviance, but lacks a theoretical framework for organizing its disparate empirical findings. Symbolic interaction research has emphasized the actor's role in defining and interpreting situations but thus far has not provided a theoretical link between motivation, opportunity, and crime. Opportunity theorists, especially those studying victimization, have made the most progress toward developing a situational theory of crime, but their emphasis on the victim rather than the offender imposes serious theoretical and methodological limitations.

The data shows how much has repeat victimatization is all over the world and how situational explanation has evolved over the year. With the data collected we form a new technique to identify repeat victimization and also how situational expalantion can be used in helping understand repeat victimization as well.

Stein's method is a general method in probability theory to obtain bounds on the distance between two probability distributions with respect to a probability metric. A complex manifold X is called holomorphically spreadable if for any point Xo E X there are holomorphic functions h, ... , f N on X such that Xo is isolated in the set

N(h, ... ,fN) = {x EX: hex) = ... = fN(X) = D}.

It is clear that the holomorphic map f := (h, ... ,fN) : X -+ eN is discrete at Xo. In [Gr55] it is shown that if n = dim(X), then there is a discrete holomorphic map 7r : X -+ en. Thus (X, 7r) is a branched domain over en. Furthermore, it follows that the topology of X has a countable base. Note that if X is holomorphically separable, i.e., for any x, y E X with x f:. y there exists a holomorphic function f on X with f(x) =1= fey), then it is holomorphically spreadable.

If X is holomorphically spreadable, A c X a compact analytic set, and Xo E A, then there are holomorphic functions h, ... , fN on X (which then must be constant on A) such that Xo is isolated in NUl, ... '!N). SO Xo must be an isolated point of A, and it follows that every compact analytic subset of X is finite!

Stress is a feeling of emotional or physical tension. It can come from any event or thought that makes you feel frustrated, angry, or nervous. Stress is your body's reaction to a challenge or demand. In short bursts, stress can be positive, such as when it helps you avoid danger or meet a deadline.