Forensic Psychology For Dummies (69 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Fear of crime and the actual experience of crime aren’t always closely related. Fear of crime is often highest in those people who feel vulnerable, such as the infirm and elderly, but in fact this group is the least likely to have directly suffered a crime unless they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The effect of local situations on crime
The relative incidence of crimes can be very different in different locations: for example, amongst street gangs in Chicago or Detroit, or vendettas between organised crime groups and within social groups for whom violence is a way of life (as I discuss in Chapter 2). Although these crimes capture the attention of the mass media and raise public concern, the simple fact is that in Western countries the number of crimes reported overall has been dropping steadily for the last 20 years or so.
Over the last decade, a growing number of people think that crime is increasing, but in fact both reported crime and crime surveys show that crime has generally been decreasing.
The murder rate in Oxford in the late 16th century (at the time of William Shakespeare) was many times higher than it’s anywhere in the UK today.
Breaking the cycle: Criminals becoming victims and victims becoming criminals
In this section, I want to emphasise an important point that’s often missed: many criminals are also victims. So when forensic psychologists are helping prisoners (as I describe in Part V) they have to keep in mind that they’re also dealing with people who are likely to have been victims of crime. The typical victim of crime is a young man living in a poor inner city area, possibly with a lone, unemployed parent in rented accommodation. But that’s also a description of a typical criminal offender. These young men are likely to have been part of a subculture in which theft isn’t unusual and using violence to defend oneself is expected.
The factors that can increase the possibility of a person becoming a victim of crime (for a list, flip to the earlier section ‘Identifying the victims’) are particularly relevant within a community of criminals, especially within a prison. Therefore, one of the challenges of imprisonment that forensic psychologists who work in prisons (or prison psychologists as they’re sometimes called) have to deal with, is to create an environment in which vulnerable individuals don’t become victims, with all the traumatic and personally destructive consequences that can entail.
Secondary victims
Many crimes cause a fall-out beyond the immediate victim; family, friends and neighbours can all be secondary victims. A criminal event can disturb even passers-by and witnesses. Major criminal events such as the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York (9/11) can cause a trauma that spreads around the world. In New York itself, reports indicate a 25 per cent increase in alcohol consumption after 9/11, a sure sign of an increase in fear and anxiety.
One particularly vulnerable group of people are those who work as street-level sex workers. Of course, people who sell sex on the streets of cities have a lifestyle that’s very different from the dangerously romantic image of the film
Pretty Woman
. For most sex workers, prostitution isn’t a favoured career choice; the great majority are under pressure from pimps or drug addiction to earn money in the way they do.
Those who work the streets are more vulnerable to assault and homicide. Their vulnerability illustrates the circumstances that can combine to increase the risk of suffering crime:
Dangerous locations:
Sex work is illegal in most places and so has to be carried out away from the relative safety of public settings. This is especially hazardous outdoors without any recourse to others for help.
When crimes are committed against sex workers, investigators have difficulty gaining information from the victims or their associates, because of the way revelations about their activities open them up to prosecution. The women are also likely to have been brought into the country illegally so do not have the requisite papers, work permits or visas to stay. Because they may fear deportation to much worse conditions back home they’re reluctant to report an assault to the police. Furthermore, their clients are also committing an illegal act that they don’t want others to know about, and so they’re extremely reluctant to volunteer information to help the police. Identifying clients in the first place is also difficult for detectives.