Vulnerability To Burglary

Relative Vulnerability to Burglary and the Crime Drop in England and Wales

Andromachi Tseloni, from the Nottingham Trent University, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Crime and Society,” under the title “Relative Vulnerability to Burglary and the Crime Drop in England and Wales”. Here is the abstract: Since the mid-1990’s most of the industrialised world experienced unprecedented and sustained falls in volume crime. In England and Wales crimes measured by the British Crime Survey (BCS) fell 50 per cent between 1995 and 2010 while burglary recorded incidents dropped by 63% during the same period but increased by 14% in 2010/11. Domestic burglary is an invasive and costly crime which generates the highest fear of crime to the general public at any given time. This study examines the over time changes in relative vulnerability of population subgroups with regards to household socio-demographic characteristics, area type and region during the period of national burglary falls. To this end it reanalyses the results of statistical models of burglary incidence drawn from three BCS sweeps before and towards the end of the crime falls, 1992, 1994 and 2008/09, to discern the direct changes in group-specific burglary incidence which are unmediated by and conditional to other possibly confounding attributes. The results show that, while burglaries fell by at least 80% for all, the profile of the most vulnerable household has hardly changed over time. If anything those most affected by frequent burglaries are worse off in 2008/09 compared to 1991 relatively to others. Burglary has become more concentrated on those already vulnerable.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

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Further Reading

• “Relative Vulnerability to Burglary and the Crime Drop in England and Wales”, by Andromachi Tseloni (Proceedings)