The sting in the tail of the British Crime Survey: Multiple victimisations

The British Crime Survey (BCS) has made a major contribution to the understanding of repeat and chronic victimisation. BCS evidence on repeats has led to a range of theoretical and methodological developments capable of informing crime control and victim services. The present paper shows that BCS counting conventions mask the extent of chronic victimisation in most official BCS reports. Crucially, where a victim reports multiple linked and similar events, the series is capped at an arbitrary maximum of five incidents. By thus truncating the long statistical “tail” of victimisation, the incidence of personal crime was reduced by at least a third in every BCS sweep since 2001–2002, and by 52% in the 2005–2006 BCS. The incidence of property crime is reduced by up to a quarter, and by 15% in the 2005–2006 BCS. The contribution of harms against those frequently victimised to total crime suffered is thus revealed as even more important than hitherto acknowledged, and personal crime is revealed as constituting a higher proportion of all crime suffered.