PART 2

RESULTS OF THE DURBAN VICTIM SURVEY

Chapter 3

INTRODUCTION

Victim surveys have been conducted across the world for the past 30 years as a means of supplementing police crime statistics. Official statistics about crime, given a range of factors, are not always accessible or accurate. Compiling official statistics depends on both the public to report crime and the police to record the details once they do. But the nature of criminal events themselves often mitigate against reporting. Some incidents are not regarded as significant enough to warrant the effort. Others are sensitive and victims prefer not to disclose the details to a stranger behind a desk in a police charge office.

Reducing crime requires that practitioners understand the extent and nature of the problem. Accurate information is therefore vital. Victim surveys are the one source of information that can fill the gaps left by official crime statistics. They present an independent source about crime based on questions asked of a representative sample of the population in a specific geographic area. As such, victim surveys record the experience of crime from the unique perspective of the victim. Crimes that are not recorded in official police records are captured in the survey, as are the details about each offence. Information of this sort is limited in official records since the criminal justice process requires the collation of the offender’s rather than the victim’s details.

The Durban victim survey is the third in a series of four city victim surveys conducted by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). Comparable surveys were carried out in the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg (July 1997), Cape Town (February 1998) and Pretoria (April 1998).2 The Durban survey was conducted in December 1997. The ISS has also conducted victim surveys in rural areas of the country, as well as in two local council areas: Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape and Highveld Ridge in Mpumalanga.3

As in the case of both the Johannesburg and Pretoria victim surveys, the results of the Durban survey have been channelled directly to the metropolitan government’s crime control and reduction initiatives.4 For this reason, the data below is presented in a way that can assist practitioners and decision makers in local and provincial government, the police, the non-governmental community and other sectors that are working towards making the Durban metropolitan area safer.

The data presented in this monograph focuses on the extent and nature of crime in Durban, who is most at risk of particular crimes, public levels of anxiety about crime, and the perceptions of victims and of the public, in general, about the police. As such, the report provides a balance between the reality of victimisation, on the one hand, and public perception about crime, on the other. This information is essential for formulating local crime prevention strategies.

Strengths of victim surveys

Victim surveys provide several types of information necessary in understanding crime and developing localised responses to crime reduction and control. These include:

Determining the extent of crime: Survey data measures those crimes that are not recorded by the police. If conducted at regular intervals over an extended period of time, victim surveys enable an assessment of the extent to which changes in crime levels — as recorded by the police — are real or a function of changing reporting tendencies.



Identifying who is most at risk of particular crimes: Because victim surveys gather information from both victims and non-victims who are part of a representative sample of the population in any area, the data can show whether particular people are more at risk of victimisation than others. This information (which is more difficult to extract from police statistics) is essential for designing crime reduction strategies — a process that involves prioritising certain crime categories and vulnerable groups. Surveys also enable the measurement of who is at risk of becoming a repeat victim of a particular crime, as well as the levels of multiple victimisation across different crime types.



Understanding the nature of particular crime types, especially those that are rarely reported to the police: Victim surveys provide useful information such as where and when crimes are most likely to occur, the relationship between victims and offenders, weapons used and the degree of violence and injury sustained. This information is particularly important in the case of crimes such as mugging and assault that are infrequently reported to the police.



Measuring levels of fear of crime: Feelings of insecurity have social, economic and political consequences for society and, as such, anxiety about crime needs to be addressed as an issue in itself. High levels of fear can also affect the way the public respond to crime reduction initiatives. The information is therefore important for the marketing of strategies. By recording the perceptions of both victims and non-victims, the surveys illustrate the extent and nature of fear of crime.



Determining public perceptions of police effectiveness and service delivery: Victim surveys provide a useful mechanism for recording the opinions of the general public and of victims about the performance of the police.



Establishing the opinions of victims and the general public about appropriate interventions: Crime prevention and victim support are relatively new fields in South Africa. Accurate information about what victims would prefer in this regard is particularly relevant.

The strengths of victim surveys are well recognised. The International Crime Victim Survey (ICVS) has now been conducted in more than 50 countries. In the United States and the United Kingdom, national victim surveys are conducted on a regular basis.5 The Durban survey was based on a questionnaire similar to that used by the International Crime Victim Survey.6 The ISS city surveys differ primarily from the ICVS model, however, in their application as street rather than household surveys.

Limitations of the city victim survey

While city victim surveys provide valuable information about the crime situation in particular localities, certain limitations relating to the street survey methodology, as well as to victim surveys more generally, should be acknowledged:

Higher crime levels? Interviewing people on the street may result in higher crime counts as those who are particularly active (and thus more likely to be the victims of certain crimes) are more likely to be interviewed.



Undercounting or non-counting of some crime types: Both street surveys and household victim surveys undercount crimes of a sensitive nature such as sexual assault.7 Incidents in which the victim and offender know each other are also undercounted in victim surveys, since respondents may not perceive these as ‘real crimes’ and may also be reluctant to disclose details to interviewers.8 Thus, the levels of domestic or ‘non-stranger’ violence may not be fully reflected in victim survey data.

Moreover, crimes such as child abuse, fraud, corruption, crimes against business and ‘victimless crimes’ such as drugtaking or soliciting are not usually covered in victim surveys. In the case of child abuse, parental consent is required to survey children. Specialised focused surveys that are accompanied by qualitative methods are more appropriate for measuring these types of crime.

The ISS city victim surveys focused on the more serious crime types due to budgetary constraints. This means that crimes such as theft out of motor vehicles and bicycle theft were not covered.

Is data on the risk of burglary affected by the street sample? According to the sampling frame, representative categories of respondents are interviewed in public places across the city. However, since people are chosen on the street and not in their homes (as is the case in household surveys), it is impossible to control where respondents actually live. While the sample may target a representative number of people in the streets of the inner city, for example, the number who actually reside in the inner city may vary dramatically. The implications for establishing who is most at risk of a particular crime are most serious for burglary, since this is the one crime type that is directly associated with the victim’s home. The problem is much less serious for other crimes such as mugging, assault and car theft. The risk of victimisation for these crimes depends largely on where and when people work, shop and engage in recreation. However, as shown in figure 1, this problem appears to have been limited in the Durban survey, since there was a close correlation between where people were interviewed and where they live.



Difficulties remembering details of a crime: Limitations arising from the inability of victims to recall experiences of crime are a recognised problem. Respondents may make up an offence, not realise that an incident constitutes one of the offences covered in the survey, incorrectly remember when the event happened, or forget a relevant incident altogether.9

Studies of methodological limitations related to memory generally conclude that the biases in the data result in an undercount of crime (rather than an overcount as is often suspected).10 Trivial crimes such as minor thefts and vandalism are most likely to be forgotten in an interview, while more serious crimes are usually well remembered and may even be overcounted, as more important events tend to be "pulled forward in time."11 This is probably one of the reasons for the higher than expected murder rates recorded by the ISS city victim surveys (see page 58 below).

Comparing survey data with police statistics

The data on crime provided by victim surveys should be seen as complementary to that recorded by the police. Together, these data sets provide a better picture of crime than can be obtained by either form of data alone. While the two sets of information measure various aspects of crime that are not always directly comparable, both provide important perspectives on the nature of crime. When comparing police and victim survey data the following should be borne in mind:

Different boundaries: Local government boundaries generally do not coincide with police station or police area boundaries in South Africa, which makes comparison across specific geographic areas difficult.



Varying definitions of crime: While definitions of incidents vary, interviewers applied broad police classifications for the following crime types covered in the city victim surveys: burglary, robbery, vehicle theft, car-hijacking, assault and murder. In the case of sexual assault and sexual harassment, definitions varied considerably from those used by the police.

Definitional problems are less of an issue than they may seem at the outset. In the UK, where a national victim survey has been carried out eight times since 1982,12 analysis has shown that police and public definitions coincide for many offences. Disagreement is most likely to occur in respect of less serious incidents, such as those which are defined using moral judgement (such as some sexual incidents), and those for which there is discretion in taking legal action. Victim surveys have generally been found to count a broader set of incidents than police statistics, although this is less likely in the Durban survey, which is limited to eight types of serious crime.



Unreported and unrecorded crime: Not all crimes are reported by the public to the police and, even when reported, not all offences are recorded. In Durban, for example, over a third of crimes recorded by the victim survey were not reported to the police. However, this varies significantly across crime types. Virtually all car-hijackings were reported to the police, whereas few muggings were brought to their attention. Because victim surveys capture incidents that may not have been reported to the authorities, levels for some categories of crime are likely to be higher than those recorded in police statistics.

This is the major strength of victim surveys. By comparing police statistics with those obtained from victim surveys, for example, it is possible to establish whether crime is actually increasing or whether the increase reflected in police statistics is simply the result of more people reporting crime to the authorities.