• Josh Sweeney, Jason Payne
• Australian Institute of Criminology

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27 June 2011This study examines the self-reported victimisation and fear of victimisation for three crime types - physical assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft - using data collected from 816 adult police detainees interviewed as part of the AIC’s DUMA program. Specifically, data were collected from alleged offenders who were detained and interviewed (but not yet convicted) during the second quarter of 2010 (April-June) at any one of the following eight DUMA data collection sites - Bankstown, Parramatta, Brisbane, Southport, East Perth, Adelaide, Footscray and Darwin. For each of the three offence types, detainees were asked to indicate the number of occasions they had been a victim in the past 12 months and whether they considered it likely or very likely that they would be a victim of the offence in the next 12 months. For those who reported being victims, questions were also designed to ascertain the victim’s knowledge of their offender and their willingness to report their victimisation to the police.

To identify the extent to which police detainees reported higher or lower rates of victimisation when compared with the general population, comparative analysis was conducted using data from the Australian component of the 2004 ICVS. However, as the detainee population was predominately male and aged under 35 years, and because victimisation experiences are likely to vary by age and gender, weighting the data was necessary to ensure accurate and reliable comparisons. To this end, the ICVS data were weighted in proportion to the age and gender profile of the DUMA detainees.

There are a number of limitations that should be considered when interpreting these results. First, it is important to note that DUMA is a voluntary self-report survey of alleged offenders detained by the police and as with all self-report surveys, the quality of the data is dependent on the truthfulness and reliability of the respondents. Second, the ICVS data used for comparative analysis was collected in 2004, some six years earlier than the data collected from police detainees. Although other more recent victimisation surveys have been conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), data with sufficient disaggregation by age and gender to allow for detailed data weighting and analysis are not available to the public. Further, unlike ICVS, the ABS surveys do not include comparable questions on the fear or expectations of victimisation; see Sweeney and Payne (forthcoming) for further methodological information about the DUMA program.

Photo: Savara / flickr