14. Victimology
14.3 Measuring Victimisation
Dr. Jordana K. Norgaard and Dr. Benjamin Roebuck
Crime, and the factors related to it, are complex and can be measured in a variety of ways (Cotter, 2021). As discussed in 5 Methods and Counting Crime, data collected from the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and victimisation surveys offer different information on crime; some differ in the populations they sample from, such as offenders versus victims, while others make different assumptions about the reliability and validity of their data (Winterdyk, 2020). In Canada, victimisation surveys are primarily used to help uncover crimes that have not been reported to the police, otherwise known as the dark figure of crime. These surveys can be conducted in a number of different ways in order to obtain more detailed information on different crimes and their impact, such as the injury and cost to victims and/or survivors, as well as to better understand why some crimes do not come to the attention of the police. The decision to report or not report a crime is dependent on a number of factors, ranging from the type of relationship the victim has with the perpetrator, the nature and severity of the crime, the circumstances of the crime, the victim’s previous contact with police, and the level of confidence the victim has in the criminal justice system (Fisher et al., 2016; Sinha, 2015).
General Social Survey
The largest administered victimisation survey in Canada is the General Social Survey (GSS). Established in 1985, the GSS asks Canadians about their experiences with criminal victimisation, including incidents not reported to the police, as well as a number of socio-demographic questions. These questions provide relevant stakeholders with more detailed information to examine victimisation rates across different populations and jurisdictions (Cotter, 2021). Results from the most recent GSS survey in 2019 reported 8 million incidents of criminal victimisation. It is estimated that one in five (19%) individuals (almost 6 million people) 15 years of age or older in Canada reported that in the past 12 months they or their household had been a victim of one of the eight [1] types of crime measured by the GSS (Cotter, 2021). This is in stark contrast to the 2.2 million incidents reported to police in 2019 (Moreau et al., 2020).
A number of other smaller surveys seek to gather further information about the experiences of victims not captured in traditional standard surveys like the GSS. Listed below are some examples. (see 5. Methods and Counting Crime)
Students’ experiences of unwanted sexualized behaviours and sexual assault at post-secondary schools in the Canadian provinces (SISPSP): A 2019 survey that measured the nature and prevalence of unwanted sexual and discriminatory behaviours and sexual assault among students of Canadian postsecondary institutions.
Survey of Safety in Public and Private Spaces (SSPPS): A 2018 survey that explored Canadians’ experiences of saf