The Time Course of Repeat Burglary Victimization

Repeat burglary victimization in Malawi and the influence of housing type and area-level affluence

“…6 The probability of a burglary occurring in a household that has already suffered a burglary is 0.383. 7 In line with previous research ( Polvi et al , 1991 ;Sagovsky and Johnson, 2007 ), this suggests that on being burgled once, Malawian households are nearly three times as likely to be burgled again over the one-year study period.…”

“…Consistent with the literature more generally, already burgled households display an elevated risk of subsequent victimization that tends to diminish over time ( Polvi et al , 1991 ;Pease, 1998 ). Sagovsky and Johnson (2007) using data from Australia fi nd that the probability of a household being burgled again after an initial victimization is six times that of becoming a victim in the fi rst place.…”

“…Sagovsky and Johnson (2007) using data from Australia fi nd that the probability of a household being burgled again after an initial victimization is six times that of becoming a victim in the fi rst place. In Saskatoon, Canada, the rate of further burglaries to the same household is nearly four times that of being burgled once ( Polvi et al , 1991 ). Many burglaries are thus repeat offences concentrating on a small minority of households.…”

Investigating Repeated Victimization With the NCVS

“…A decade of pioneering work in England emphasizing repeated burglary victimization has found that prior victimization is the best predictor of subsequent victimization and that this subsequent burglary victiniization occurs a very short time after the first (Pease and Laycock, 1997;Polvi et al, 1991). These findings have been used to allocate police resources to prevent subsequent burglary.…”

Crime concentration theory

“…Features of the house are such as to mark it out as a compellingly attractive target to all those tempted to burgle it, leading to repeat victimizations linked only by the seductiveness of the target." (Polvi et al 1991;414) The first of these denotes event dependency and has become known as the boost hypothesis, the second might be termed the buddy theory, and the third denotes risk heterogeneity and is known as the flag hypothesis. This led to a model of the relationship between repeat victimization and high crime areas which drew on Cohen and Felson's notion of multiplicative interactions (Farrell et al 1996.…”