The victimisation-offending relationship

Friday, October 7, 2016 Josja Rokven will defend her dissertation entitled at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Radboud University Nijmegen. Supervisors are prof. Dr. Stijn Ruiter (NSCR) and prof. Dr. Gerbert Kraaykamp.
Perpetrators of crime are at increased risk of being a victim. Victims in turn are more likely to commit crimes than non-victims. Josja Rokven examined the explanations for this reciprocal relationship. The increased offending risk among victims may be explained by victims often having friends who commit crime. Those friends increase the likelihood that they also commit offenses themselves. Secondly, Rokven shows that the association to a large extent is based on a spurious connection; offenders and victims often have similar characteristics. Men, immigrants, and young adults are more likely to be both offender and victim than women, natives, and older adults.
To provide a detailed description of the reciprocal relationship between victimisation and offending, nationwide representative victimisation surveys (Safety Monitor VMR and the Integrated Safety Monitor IVM), obtained from Statistics Netherlands, were combined with longitudinal registration data on suspects (Suspect Identification System HKS), obtained from the Dutch Police. A new data collection was also started to study the underlying explanations for the victimisation-offending relationship. This resulted in CrimeNL, a longitudinal study of individuals' experiences with crime in the Netherlands.
Biography
Josja Rokven studied sociology at Tilburg University. In 2011, she started as a PhD candidate at the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS) at the Radboud University Nijmegen and the Netherlands Institute for Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR).
Credits picture: © Radboud University