Office for Victims of Crime (OVC)
To focus on assistance to crime victims, change attitudes about victimization, and work to help victims rebuild their lives after they have experienced a victimization
Oversees the Crime Victims Fund and works with states on compensation plans; collects data on victimization programs in the United States
Victim Surveys
The federal government created the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in 1979 to better understand victimization that was not reported, as well as broader criminal justice issues. The BJS collects and publishes statistics about crime in the United States. Unlike the UCR, which just focused on crime statistics, the BJS collects information on corrections and prisoners, recidivism, court cases, victims, and law enforcement. They collect an annual census of prisoners throughout the United States to help us understand corrections and data from victims that are and are not reported to the police (and thus left out of the UCR). The BJS looks at how police respond to calls and offers grants to professionals seeking to improve our understanding of crime and justice. This helps us compensate for any issues in official data.
Victim surveys take two forms: (1) sampling from the general population to ask about victimization and (2) targeting particular crime victims. The largest victimization survey in the United States is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). It is administered by the BJS and began in 1973 as the National Crime Survey (NCS), to survey the general population about victimization. The BJS surveys approximately 135,000 U.S. households, composed of nearly 225,000 people, asking about their experiences with victimization. The survey asks primarily about Part 1 offenses (except murders), but occasionally adds supplemental questions around bullying and attitudes about the police. It asks about crimes that were and were not reported, as well as offender information. It also asks about characteristics of the crime (e.g., time and place, weapons, injuries, and economic consequences) and victim experiences with the criminal justice system (BJS, 2016).
One early result for the NCVS was to notice how much crime was reported in the survey but was missing from police data. This is called the dark figure of crime, also known as hidden crime (Walsh & Hemmens, 2014). The NCVS, other surveys, and research from nongovernmental agencies and individuals have significantly increased our understanding of how much crime there is and why it is not reported.
The dark figure of crime is the gap between reported crime and that total amount of crime, which goes unreported or undiscovered. Image: Dark Figure of Crime. Source: Barnes & Noble Education. License: CC-BY NC SA
In addition to the individual surveys, the BJS also conducted city surveys, starting with eight impacted cities but ending with 26 cities. The city surveys were discontinued a few years later, upon recommendation to just focus on the NCVS. That does not mean that cities have disappeared as a focus of other research. The national archive of criminal justice data houses several research data sets collected during the last 40 years that look at various cities’ victimization experiences. City victimization data allow local agencies to focus policy decisions and services directly toward local victims and on local problems that might not be obvious in either their official data or state and regional trends. City victimization data can also help identify victim service gaps and locations where prevention programs might be created.