by Renée ZAUBERMAN, Philippe ROBERT, Sophie NÉVANEN, Emmanuel DIDIER – december 2006
The French Forum for Urban Security has commissioned the CESDIP, which has long been studying victimization and insecurity, to conduct five urban surveys on that subject in 2005. Sophie Nevanen, Emmanuel Didier, Renée Zauberman and Philippe Robert report here on some of the campaign’s findings.
The expansion of victimization surveys rests on six contributions specific to the approach :
- it provides information on cases of victimization unknown to official services because they were neither reported to the police nor uncovered by them ;
- they measure the propensity of victims to resort to different sorts of recourse (reporting) ;
- they are an adjunct to police statistics, which only count offences and suspects, in that they provide a description of the victims involved ;
- they shed light on the relationship between victimization and feelings of insecurity ;
- they point up victimisation profiles based more on the way the incident is experienced and negotiated than on legal categories ;
- they open up a differential, territorially-based analysis of crime set on new grounds : victimisation.
The present paper enumerates the main findings of a survey conducted in 2005 in four northern Paris suburban cities and in the Lyons metropolitan area.
