Repeat Victims

Ken Pease in his publication Repeat Victimisation: Taking Stock (1998) states that the likelihood of repeat victimisation is affected:

• By personal characteristics with, for e.g. lone parent households being particularly likely to suffer crime recurrence, and the elderly being the most unlikely. He lists the following as the key reasons for repeats

• The presence of good, and lack of bad, consequences of the first crime for the offender, and the stability of the situation which presents itself to an offender on the first and subsequent visits to the scene of his/her crime

• The failure to change circumstances which led to the crime which may be a result of many factors e.g.

• Poverty

• Lack of motivation to prevent crime

• Lack of awareness that a crime has taken place (as in embezzlement & fraud)

• Perception of the crime as the lesser to two evils (as in domestic violence where escape also means removing from one's children their father's economic support and their removal from a home to the nobly provided but inadequate conditions afforded by refuges.

(Pease K. (1998) Repeat Victimisation: Taking Stock. Crime Prevention & Detection Paper 90. London: Home Office. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/prgpdfs/fcdps90.pdf)