Cross-National Differences in Victimization:Disentangling the Impact of Composition and Context

Varying rates of criminal victimization across countries are assumed to be the outcome of countrylevel structural constraints that determine the supply ofmotivated o¡enders, as well as the differential composition within countries of suitable targets and capable guardianship. However, previous empirical tests of these ‘compositional’ and ‘contextual’ explanations of cross-national di¡erences have been performed upon macro-level crime data due to the unavailability of comparable individual-level data across countries. This limitation has had two important consequences for cross-national crime research. First, micro-/meso-level mechanisms underlying cross-national differences cannot be truly inferred from macro-level data. Secondly, the e¡ects of contextual measures (e.g. income inequality) on crime are uncontrolled for compositional heterogeneity. In this paper, these limitations are overcome by analysing individual-level victimization data across 18 countries from the International CrimeVictims Survey. Results from multi-level analyses on theft and violent victimization indicate that the national level of income inequality is positively related to risk, independent of compositional (i.e. micro- and meso-level) di¡erences. Furthermore, crossnational variation in victimization rates is not only shaped by di¡erences in national context, but also by varying composition. More speci¢cally, countries had higher crime rates the more they consisted of urban residents and regions with lowaverage social cohesion

Trends in violent crime: a comparison between police statistics and victimization surveys

police statistics, the Netherlands, trends, victimization surveys, violent crime,

Perceived discrimination in the Netherlands

There is no systematic structure in the Netherlands for mapping out the discrimination experiences of different groups in different There is no systematic structure in the Netherlands for mapping out the discrimination experiences of different groups in different areas of society. As in many other countries, discrimination studies in the Netherlands mostly focus on the experiences of specific groups, on specific domains or on specific types of discrimination. This study aims to chart the extent to which residents of the Netherlands perceive that they are subject to discrimination, from the perspectives of group identities, discrimination grounds and societal domains. In addition, it highlights the consequences that people attach to their experiences. The study shows that different types of perceived discrimination are associated with different groups, and are related to the way in which groups are perceived in Dutch society