Repeat Victimization

Repeat victimization (RV) is defined as the repeated criminal victimization of a particular target. That target can be a person, household, business place, or vehicle. The level or unit at which a target is defined may vary. For example, it may be an entire street or apartment block, or a single household or apartment. Repeat victimization can be by the same type of crime (within-crime RV) or different types of crime (acrosscrime RV). A person whose home is burgled twice is repeatedly victimized, but so too is a person who is robbed and then later burgled and whose car is taken for the getaway. A “virtual” repeat occurs when an offender victimizes two separate targets that appear identical, such as two identical cars that are stolen from the same location within a short period of time. The terms revictimization and multiple victimization are the most frequently used synonyms of repeat victimization, although the term recidivist victimization has also been used.

The first two major studies that incorporated repeat victimization as a concept called it multiple victimization; both were pioneering works in the field of victim surveys: Surveying Victims, by Richard Sparks, Hazel Genn, and David Dodds (1977), and Victims of Personal Crime: An Empirical Foundation for a Theory of Personal Victimization, by Michael Hindelang, Michael Gottfredson, and James Garafalo (1978). Although both severely underestimated rates of repeat victimization, they largely initiated the serious empirical delineation of the subject. The first publications using the term repeat victimization were a 1980 set of studies conducted by Albert J. Reiss and Stephen Fienberg, published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Despite these early works and a few intermittent studies, it was the publication of the Kirkholt experiment (in the Kirkholt public housing project near Rochdale, U.K.) in the late 1980s that gave new impetus to the study of repeat victimization. This experiment reduced repeat burglaries in a highcrime area to zero and reduced overall burglaries by 70 percent. It also spurred a range of studies and a program of research (Laycock 2000). By 2000, over 100 academic articles had been published that focused on RV issues. The vast bulk of these have been published since the mid-1990s, reflecting the growing recognition of the subject's importance and its exciting potential to inform crime policy, practice, and crime-related theory.